


although it is night

by Misfit_McCoward



Category: Yu-Gi-Oh! Duel Monsters (Anime & Manga)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Role Reversal, Art inside, Gen, Ghosts, Haunting, Yu-Gi-Oh! Big Bang 2019, author does NOT understand the difference between Yami Bakura and King Thief Bakura
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-09
Updated: 2019-08-11
Packaged: 2020-08-13 09:54:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 29,112
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20172313
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Misfit_McCoward/pseuds/Misfit_McCoward
Summary: Bakura and Ryou-centric role reversal AU: Bakura’s life takes a turn for the strange when he steals a weird piece of jewelry. Not that spending his days shoplifting purses for Malik’s knock-off handbag crime empire and his evenings making bets on card games was necessarily normal. It’s just that now he also has a weirdly polite ghost to worry about.





	1. how well i know the spring that flows & runs (although it is night)

**Author's Note:**

> This is my submission for the Yu-Gi-Oh! Big Bang 2019. I was partnered with two artists, the13thcanvas and mimibanii, but they both chose to draw for the last chapter of this fic, so you will see their awesome work in a few days. :)
> 
> This fic takes place in Spain, because I used to live in Spain and I like writing about it. It also, conveniently, meant minimal research for me.

Bakura sat on his tiny balcony, legs laced through the gaps in the railing to dangle over the street below. He peeled an orange in parts, tossing the rhind carelessly up and over the railing. His apartment was shit in a lot of ways, but it was at the top of the steep hills that bordered the city, and it made for a great view. 

The sun sent a soft orange hue over the city of Granada, stretched out and rambling below. It was sunrise, which meant that Bakura was coming to the end of his day. He’d spent most of the night hustling cards– Duel Monsters, mostly, which had become disgustingly popular in the last couple of years. He rarely got to play with any of the fancy holographic interfaces you saw on TV, but plenty of people were still willing to bet on analogue games. 

Bakura always insisted loser give up a rare card in addition to cash. That was the key to winning, really. He was good, but he didn’t get  _ really _ good until he had the right cards to pick from. Now he could almost pay his rent from a weekend drifting between gaming bars. 

Once he was done with the orange, Bakura leaned back and stretched, popping his shoulders and neck. He wiped juice from his hand onto his shirt and then reached back to where he’d tossed his phone out of the way. 

Malik had called him twice more since Bakura had shoved his phone away, and then sent a series of texts demanding to meet up. 

Bakura stood and stretched again. There were left-overs in the fridge. He was going to heat them up in his barely functional microwave, eat them, and then pass out on the mattress on the floor that was his bed.

Malik called again. Bakura continued ignoring it. 

Bakura’s apartment was literally carved out of the hillside. Everything was outdated, the layout was weird, and it was far away from everything, but it was spacious enough and Bakura didn’t have to share it with anyone. 

Bakura pulled off his shirt, flopped onto his bed, and fell asleep almost immediately. He left his phone in the kitchen to charge. Malik could call him as many times as he wanted. 

The problem with Malik, Bakura realized some hours later, was that they’d known each other since they were teenagers, and he’d made the mistake of giving Malik a spare key in a moment of weakness when he’d moved in. 

“Dude,” Malik yelled, kicking his mattress, “what part of  _ emergency _ don’t you get?”

Bakura cracked an eye and grunted at him. He was pretty sure none of the texts had mentioned an emergency. He’d hadn’t actually read them particularly carefully, but surely he would have noticed if Malik had an actual problem and wasn’t just being an attention-seeking jerk. 

Bakura folded his blanket down just enough to flip Malik off, and Malik muttered something and left. A few minutes later, Bakura heard the stolen TV he had in the living room. 

Bakura couldn’t get back to sleep with the noise, so he eventually rolled off the mattress and dug up some clean clothes. Malik was sprawled across his second-hand couch, wearing one of his stupid designer shirts and watching a dumb game show. 

“This is your emergency?” Bakura asked. 

Malik shrugged. “I suppose you could say it was less of an emergency and more of a… urgent need to share some news.”

Bakura raised his eyebrows. Malik grinned cheekily at him and switched off the TV. 

“What would you say,” Malik said, looking like the very definition of ‘shit-eating grin,’ “if I told you you’d never need to shoplift another handbag again?”

Bakura snorted. “All of your bad pitches sound the same.”

He turned and head down the stairs to his bathroom. A metal spiral staircase ran through his apartment, groaning ominously under his weight. 

“Hey!” Malik spluttered, nearly falling off the couch in his rush to follow. 

Part of the bizarre layout was that the bathroom was on the ground floor, behind the cement-floored entryway his landlord used to store several rusty bikes and a giant TV that no longer worked. The bathroom was really obviously part of a cave– it had low, uneven ceilings, and the walls were a bumpy, spackled white. 

Bakura took his time, washing his face and brushing his teeth, and he could hear Malik complaining through the door. 

“This is legit this time,” Malik was promising. “We got the holo-recognition barcode working; you would have seen if you’d just come down to the workshop–”

Bakura rolled his eyes. Malik’s “workshop” was a bunch of machines in an abandoned office building he and some other dudes were squatting in. It was on the other side of the town, and if Malik thought Bakura was going to take three different night buses to get there at five in the morning, then frankly, Malik could go choke and die. 

When Bakura opened the bathroom door, Malik was sitting on the busted TV, scrolling through his phone. 

“The handbags are lucrative,” Bakura said. 

Malik glanced up at him. “You fucking hate the handbags.”

Bakura snorted. This was undeniably true. Malik had made a small empire selling knock-off handbags, and one of the linchpins in his kingdom was that his copies were nearly indistinguishable from the originals. Bakura had provided the actual, designer handbags– several of every design, to be dissected and analyzed– which he lifted from high-end stores. 

It had made them both a lot of money, a lot more than Malik’s crappy fake Duel Monsters cards were making them. 

On the other hand, Bakura had learned to hate stealing handbags. 

“Bar La Fonte?” Malik asked.

Bakura shrugged and slipped into his shoes, left carelessly by the door. 

“What about shoes?” Bakura asked as they walked. Bakura’s neighborhood was all narrow, steep streets that winded back and forth up and down the mountain side. “Those red-backed ones sell for a lot.”

Malik shook his head. “We’d need different equipment. I told you, I got the holo-recognition working.”

Malik had been making fake gaming cards for years. Duel Monsters had always had a dedicated following, even back when it was called Magic and Wizards. Recently, though, Pegasus LLC and Kaiba Corp had teamed up to introduce working holographs to the game, and it exploded in popularity overnight. 

The holograph readers worked by reading a digital barcode embedded in the card, which was nigh-impossible for most forgeries to copy. The knock-off card industry had crumpled; Bakura was still seeing articles every once in a while about people being upset that the cards they’d gotten through an unlicensed seller didn’t work in their brand new Duel Disk. 

If Malik really had gotten the barcodes working, though… well, people would pay a lot for that certain card to complete their deck. 

Bar La Fonte was a sticky hole-in-the wall that got blistering hot in the summer, but it was close by and they had cheap sandwiches and drinks. There were three old men in the back corner, men like Bakura’s landlord who’d been born in this neighborhood and had been coming to this bar since they were young, and they were splitting a handle of vodka over their coffees. They paid no mind to Bakura and Malik, who were too young and too foreign with too long hair (and in Malik’s case, with too much over-the-top jewelry). 

“Anyway,” Malik said through a mouth full of bread and cheese and tomato, “Whether you believe me or not, it shouldn’t be too hard for you to get us some more cards, right?”

“If you’re paying me either way,” Bakura agreed. “What types of cards?”

“Monster cards are easiest,” Malik said. “Get ‘em new. Used ones… don’t work as well.”

It still seemed a bit like a lost cause to Bakura, but at least it was better than handbags. 

\--

Malik went off to negotiate with someone– probably over the god forsaken handbags– and Bakura headed for the city center. 

The streets in the city were so narrow that sometimes when a car passed, Bakura had to stand in a doorway to make room. Walking anywhere from his mountainside neighborhood sucked because, predictably, the walk was steep. Still, Bakura liked it– he liked the twisting labyrinth of streets, the darkness of the narrow pedestrian staircases connecting them, the way he could just slip into the shadows and disappear. 

In contrast, the city center was bright and tree-lined. Tourists and locals and hipsters and buskers and beggars all flocked to the restaurants, the shops, the bars. It was loud and the sun shone bright and hot, warming the cobblestones to a sizzling heat. 

Cafes spilled out onto the sidewalks, with cheap plastic tables and wide umbrellas and rickety chairs the owners would chain up after hours. Bakura wove through them, noting the purse he could steal here, the man who’s left his wallet on the table there, the teenager whose mobile phone was dangerously close to falling out of her back pocket. It was all too easy and, frankly, Bakura was sick of pickpocketing. 

He was especially sick of snatching handbags.

The hip places to buy Duel Monsters cards were now electronics stores. They had expensive hologram-projecting duel disks on the wall behind the registers, and fancy cards under glass alongside mobile phones. Bakura slowed down as he passed by, and then decided against it. He liked traditional game stores better. 

There was a store he liked off the main road, which covered two floors of a narrow building with creaking floors under thin carpet. The aisles were cramped, the store shoving as much gaming memorabilia as it could into rows and rows of shelves. 

Bakura lazed through the aisles, eyeing his fellow customers. He paused over a display of Monster World figurines, and then picked out a few dice from a poorly labeled cardboard box. 

Upstairs was a little less cramped, and Bakura pulled a book on Duel Monsters (so old that the cover read MAGIC AND WIZARDS) and flipped through it. It featured a forward from Pegasus J. Crawford himself, telling the story of how he’d discovered the game on a trip to Egypt. 

Bakura snorted and snapped the book shut. Sure, he’d ‘discovered’ a game that a whole other country already had. Whatever.

He lazed around the store a bit, then waited in line behind a bunch of teenagers to buy his fifty cent dice. He loitered outside the store, pretending to count his change while the teens opened all their Duel Monsters booster packs and loudly compared their hauls. 

They moved on, and Bakura counted to ten slowly in his head before trailing after them. It hadn’t sounded like they’d gotten much good, but Malik could sell anything, provided he could get the cards to work. 

He trailed them for twenty minutes before he made his move. He didn’t want them to associate losing all their precious cards with that nice game shop, after all. 

They never even noticed him. 

\--

Malik was busy with whatever bullshit he did during the day, so Bakura lazed around a tea shop for a while before heading to a more trendy neighborhood. This one scrambled up a different hillside, all steep cobblestone streets and uneven sidewalks, and it was filled with hipsters selling crafts and con-artists selling knock-offs and hipster-con-artists selling knock-off crafts. 

There were a lot of bars with a good gaming scene, which is what Bakura came here for. The first two bars he tried were overcrowded, and in the third one he tried to get in on a game of Monster World, but it was full. He finally settled on slaughtering a group of hipster tourists in drop-crotch pants in Duel Monsters, one after another.

The hipsters were from the Netherlands, dressed up for the neighborhood. They bought Bakura a beer for every win, so he let them talk at him. 

“Do you know Atem?” one of the hipsters asked when he said where he was from, and Bakura’s mood immediately turned bitter. 

“We don’t all know each other,” he snapped back. 

“I just thought…” the hipster spluttered. “You’re really good, is all…”

Atem was the reigning Duel Monsters champion. Bakura had never met him, on account of Egypt being a whole country just shy of a hundred million people and Bakura not having even visited since he’d moved to Spain as a teenager. But Bakura was the only Egyptian a lot of people had ever met, and he got the question an infuriating number of times. He’d like to meet Atem himself one day, just to punch him in the face. 

He left the bar tipsy and in a foul mood, intent on trudging back to his apartment to cook whatever food he had. The people in on the streets, conversing outside bars or kneeling over tarps filled with wares to sell or stumbling drunk down the pavement, annoyed him more and more with each passing step. 

He stumbled over one of the tarps, snagging the fabric on his foot and sending the fake “mystic artifacts” spilling across the street. He wasn’t even sure if he’d done it out of spite or it was a drunk accident or, somehow, a mix of both. 

The seller swore at him in Arabic, which was at least refreshing. 

Bakura very half-heartedly picked up a couple of the random items the man was selling, tossing them back onto the cloth. A couple of drunk women pitched into help as well, giggling and snorting and generally being a nuisance. 

He tossed a few of the khamsa hands the man was selling into a pile, and then discretely pocketed one for himself. He grunted a non-apology and continued on his way. 

When he was back in is own neighborhood, in the abandoned dark alleys that made up the endless trek up the mountainside, Bakura pulled out his new treasure to look at it. 

He’d thought it was an extremely stylized khamsa hand when he’d picked up, as that was half of what the man was selling. Khamsa hands, shaped like a hand with an eye in the center, were a sort of protective ward or good luck amulet, left contextless in a city that had replaced its Moorish rulers with the Catholic Inquisition, and they were popular in tourist shops. Bakura had sort of looked at the thing and gone “eye, five dangly bits” and then shoved it into his pocket. 

It was really obviously not a hand, though. It was gold with a stylized eye, embedded in an triangle and then suspended in a ring. Five pointed rods dangled from it. 

Maybe he’d give it to Malik. That bastard loved his gold jewelry. 

Bakura tossed the not-khamsa ring-thing on to his couch and forgot about. 

\--

Malik’s fake cards could be read by the holo-readers after all, and Malik smirked at Bakura from behind the giant projection of Baby Dragon in the workshop. 

“Where’d you get the duel disk from?” Bakura asked instead of being impressed. “This isn’t a knock-off too, is it?”

“If you must know,” Malik sneered, “it fell off a truck.”

“Oh, I see,” Bakura drawled. 

It was actually a shame Malik only had the one on-hand. Even if they were gimmicky, they were fun, and Malik was a pretty good player himself.

“Prove your cards work, then,” Bakura said, playing at nonchalance even though he knew Malik could read him a mile away. “Duel me in one of the public arenas.”

Malik snorted. “Winner buys dinner.”

“Deal.”

Individuals could buy woefully expensive Duel Disks, but plenty of places had huge arenas with holo-readers. Parks and malls, mostly, but the cinema nearby had sacrificed a theatre to set one up. It was a little more expensive than the mall ones, but it was closer. 

A poster of Atem loomed over them as they waited in the cinema’s line. 

“God, I hate that guy,” Malik said. “Got a sharpie?”

Bakura didn’t, but he padded down his pocket for an alternative. A pen, maybe, or a pocket knife. Instead he came up with the ring-thing. 

“What the hell is that?” Malik asked. 

Bakura didn’t know what to tell him, so he just shrugged. He’d forgotten he’d even stolen the stupid thing, and he must have left it in his pocket. When he’d been a kid, Bakura had been a horrible little gremlin of a pickpocket. He stole things he needed and things he wanted and things he didn’t want or need. He stole from strangers and he stole from people he didn’t like, and he stole from strangers he didn’t like on account of things like snooty posture or fashion choices. 

It therefore wasn’t weird for Bakura to just have random things of unknown origin, but he’d certainly grown out of a lot of the petty theft once Malik had figured out how to make real money off a different kind of theft. 

Malik was unbothered and used the pointy dangly bits of the ring to carve a mustache and devil horns into the plastic covering Atem’s poster. It was completely juvenile. Bakura was still snickering about it when it was their turn to use the duel arena. 

Malik immediately whipped out all his fake cards, just to show off that they worked. Bakura had included using the fake cards as part of his challenge– and he’d know Malik would use them excessively because he was a huge show-off, just look at how he dressed– but because Bakura lost, he griped about the cheating all way to the shitty fast food place Malik picked. 

“Here’s your weird ring back,” Malik said, dropping it onto Bakura’s plastic tray. 

Bakura thought about tossing it along with the paper his burger came in. It was dumb and he’d grabbed it on a whim. But there was something about it that he liked– the fact that he’d never seen anything like it, maybe.

On his bus ride back home– the bus swaying worryingly as it cut tight turns on the winding road up the mountain– Bakura googled a couple of phrases on his phone to see if he could figure out what the ring was. He thought maybe it was some sort of bastardized Native American dream catcher (which seemed in line with the types of things white hipsters would want to buy), but google insisted the symbol in the middle was a rare Eye of Horus, only ever found in one tomb of an unknown pharaoh. 

“Are you kidding me,” Bakura muttered. 

It was so obscure he wasn’t sure how it had made its way onto what he’d thought was a mass-produced souvenir. None of the obnoxious pagan sites explaining to white people how Bakura’s ancestors worshipped brought it up, so it didn’t look like it was in public recognition at all. Maybe it wasn’t a mass-produced piece of fake junk after all. 

He guessed he was keeping it. 

\--

Bakura woke up one day and walked into his kitchen to find all his Monster World figurines lined up neatly on his rickety two-person table. 

_ This is a terrible prank, _ he texted to Malik along with a photo. He then shoved all the figurines back into the shoe box he’d kept them in and tossed them back into the bottom of his closet. He had tried to get into Monster World several times, but usually it just turned out he didn’t like people enough for social games. Oh well. 

He went about his day– which was sitting around watching a bad sitcom and eating generic brand cereal for several hours– until Malik texted him back. 

_ Have you seen the news?? _

Bakura flipped to the local news. They were talking about increased traffic in the suburbs. He switched to a national channel, and there was some footage of a bus crash. None of these things seemed like something Malik would be interested in, unless Malik had suddenly become obsessed with distribution routes for his handbags. 

_ You’ll have to be more specific, _ Bakura replied. 

Malik sent a link. Pegasus LLC had just announced a rare card exposition to tour Europe, and it would be open two days in Madrid. In addition to rare and out-of-print cards, it boasted dueling workshops and meet-and-greets with famous players. The flyer at the bottom of the article was dominated by Exodia, but in the corner were little photos of Pegasus J. Crawford, Seto Kaiba, and the king of games of himself, all photoshopped to look like they’d taken the photo together. 

_ What? _ Bakura texted back.  _ You want to actually punch the king in the face? _

_ Ha! _ Was Malik’s reply. Several minutes later, he followed up:  _ What prank?  _

_ You broke in and lined up my game pieces like a weirdo, _ Bakura typed back. 

_ Why would I do that? _ Malik asked.  _ That seems more like something you’d do while blackout drunk. _

Bakura frowned at his phone. It wasn’t unheard for Bakura to drink that much, but he didn’t actually like losing track of his nights, and he’d definitely spent all of yesterday sober. 

_ We need to have a business meeting, _ Malik said, and Bakura rolled his eyes and left the message on read. He was getting so sick of ‘business’ and ‘meetings’ and this town. Maybe Ishizu was right and he should have done a technical program. 

Except, no, that sounded equally mindlessly boring. He switched the TV back to the sitcom. How nice it must be, he thought, to live such a stupid and mindless life as these one-dimensional, poorly-conceived characters. 

He must have fallen asleep on the couch, because suddenly it was dark and he was feeling groggy. He pushed himself up and stumbled for the light switch. He’d eat, maybe, and then go see if he could beat some new cards out of people. That seemed like a good idea. 

While his frozen lasagna microwaved, Bakura went into his room to find an extra shirt for the chilly night air. The ring was laying on his bed, splayed out across the rumpled blanket. 

Bakura had no memory of putting it there, but he shrugged it off. He grabbed a button-up and his shoebox of Duel Monsters card, and took them upstairs to the tiny second floor room that served as his kitchen. He sat on the balcony and sorted through his cards over dinner. 

\--

Malik texted him more about business meetings, and while Bakura understood why they couldn’t just text about what card Malik wanted swiped from a shop, or what handbag Malik wanted next, or a negotiation of Bakura’s pay, it was still really annoying. 

Bakura texted Ishizu instead. He sent her a link to a page about the weird Eye of Horus and asked her opinion. She was studying this shit, so surely she’d have a good opinion on it, unlike Malik who just wanted to talk about acquiring rare cards. 

_ What am I, your personal encyclopedia? _ Ishizu answered, hours later.  _ Not even pretending to care how I’m doing first? _

Bakura frowned at the message thread. Apparently the last time he’d texted her, it was four months ago and also about random trivia. He was pretty sure he’d seen her between that last text and now– she and Rishid visited Malik every once in a while– and Malik hadn’t gone on any emergency trips to Madrid recently, so obviously she was fine. 

_ How are you doing? _ He texted. 

_ How ingenuous, _ Ishizu replied instead of a real answer, and then she sent him a paragraph about how the tomb had been uncovered by accident by locals in January 2000, giving it the nickname “Millennium Site.” In addition to normal pottery and carvings, several mysterious gold artefacts had been uncovered, all emblazoned with the stylized Eye of Horus, nicknamed the “Millennium Items.” 

_ Some people think it might be some sort of elaborate hoax, _ she concluded.  _ It was uncovered in a site that had already been pretty thoroughly excavated in the 80s, and a lot of the artefacts don’t really fit with what we know about the times. Some genetic work was done on the mummy entombed there, too, and some fishy stuff came up.  _

Bakura did not know one thing about genetics, but apparently whatever they’d done indicated that the body wasn’t from that part of the country, and also they’d found traces of modern European DNA on the wrappings. Of course, that could be from any of the various researchers handling it. 

Finally, Ishizu asked,  _ Where did you find it?  _

_ Not even going to ask how I’m doing? _ Bakura answered. 

_ Oh, I forgot you’re funny. _

_ A guy was selling a thing with it on it, _ he said. 

_ Where? _ Ishizu asked immediately.  _ Did he say where he got it? Can you go back? _

Bakura didn’t see why Ishizu would care. It wasn’t like something a guy was hawking on the street could be anything approaching a legitimate Millennium Item. 

_ Sorry, _ he lied. 

He tucked his phone into his pocket and went to pull the ring out of the kitchen drawer he kept random things in. It was kind of cool, he decided, to have something that was part of a weird mystery. Maybe Ishizu was onto something with her archaeology degree. 

Malik wanted him to get a Dark Magician, because apparently Malik was now taking commissions from desperate duelists and Dark Magician was super popular. It was, after all, Atem’s trademark card. Bakura might as well go find a Dark Magician Girl too, since anyone with half a brain would want that next. Then again, people who just wanted to copy a celebrity’s deck might not have half a brain. 

On his way into town, he bought a cheap faux leather cord and hung the ring around his neck from it. It was cool, after all. 

\--

Bakura woke up in the creepy storage room he wasn’t technically allowed in, sprawled over all the random crap his landlord kept in there. 

The storage room was between the ground floor and the first floor, dug into the earth and then spackled white like the bathroom below it. The ceiling was so low he couldn’t stand fully in it, and the entrance was covered with a unevenly cut piece of black fabric. 

The landlord kept things in there, and part of Bakura’s rental contract was that he wasn’t allowed in. The landlord promised that he’d call at least 24 hours in advance if he needed anything from the room, and it had seemed like a weird but bearable agreement to Bakura, especially given the landlord never asked about where Bakura’s money came from or asked to see payslips. 

Bakura had, of course, gone through the room even before he’d finished unpacking from his move-in. It was overwhelmingly useless junk: old lamps and broken furniture, vinyl bags of old clothes, plastic toys from the landlord’s now adult son, a typewriter with missing keys. He’d been living here nearly two years and his landlord had not once come to get anything. 

For a brief, terrifying moment, Bakura had had no idea where he was. His back was in knots, and when he flailed to get up, he banged his knee painfully on a chest of drawers. 

He had no memory of going in there, and he had no idea why he would be tempted to. He liked the idea of a secret, forbidden room full of possessions, but they were all worthless objects he didn’t care about. 

There was no light in the room, and Bakura stumbled and tripped and swore as he struggled for the exit. He crawled out onto the spiral staircase and went up to his living room to discover it was afternoon. 

He remembered going down to the corner store at around 5pm the day before to grab some groceries, and then nothing else. 

It was disturbing. Bakura had heard all sorts of horrible stories about people being drugged on the streets, or about people having breakdowns and losing track of themselves, but none of those things seemed like things that could happen to _ him. _

He decided not to let it bother him. It was a fluke. He was going to be late to meet Malik. He took a long, cold shower that would make him even later to their meeting, and then walked down to the bus stop with his duffel bag. 

“You said I wouldn’t have to do this anymore,” Bakura drawled as he dumped the contents of the duffel bag onto the collapsable table Malik referred to as his “work desk.”

Malik grabbed one of the handbags and zipped it open, examining the soft pink lining. 

“They changed the shade of pink again,” Malik whined. Then he added, “We need to build up a good reputation with the cards before we can start making the  _ real _ money–”

Malik went on a whole speech about how once people realized they could get unlicensed cards that played just as well as real ones, then they could get more customers and blah blah blah. Bakura had heard the speech before. He got out his phone and opened Candy Crush. 

“And that’s why we’re entering the tournament,” Malik concluded, and Bakura looked up. 

“What?” he said. 

Malik twitched, scowling at him and putting his hands on his hips, exactly the way Ishizu did right before she was going to tell him he was a moron. “In Sevilla,” he clarified. 

“In Sevilla,” Bakura repeated. 

“For the Euro League prelims,” Malik stressed, now tapping his foot. “Just for the Sevilla tournament, you win 200 euros and Red Eyes Black Dragon. The grand prize for the whole League is the Winged Dragon of Ra and even more cash–”

Bakura snorted. “What, you think you can win? We’d have a better shot going in as audience members and then mugging the winner after.”

Or maybe not mugging– maybe Bakura would convince them to go to drinks, or follow them back to their hotel room and take  _ all _ their cards, or maybe he’d corner them in an alley and make them duel him and show off just how much better he was. Yes, those all seemed like appealing options to him. 

“If we pass prelims in Sevilla, the next round is in Paris,” Malik continued, “where the grand prize is–”

Bakura didn’t really care about prizes, though, and he rolled his eyes and went back to Candy Crush. Sure, he liked winning, and he liked getting stuff, but he’d rather do it his way than enter some stupid tournament. 

“If you win, I’ll get another guy to get the handbags until Paris,” Malik finished. 

Bakura glanced back up from his phone. “You’re covering travel expenses,” he said. 

“Deal,” Malik agreed. 

\--

As far as Bakura could tell, the entire Ishtar family was prone to micromanaging. When they were younger, Ishizu would get it into her mind that they should take the university track at high school, or that Rishid should get a certain type of job, and then she’d insist that’s what was going to happen until it did. Malik did the same thing with his handbag crime syndicate– he’d just decide something and then he’d bully everyone around him until they all bent to his whims. 

If Bakura were to do some psychoanalyzing, he’d blame their control issues on their batshit abusive father, now dead in some backwater village in Egypt. But just because it was understandable, it didn’t mean it wasn’t also incredibly annoying. Bakura agreed to this dumb tournament scheme, but that he didn’t need Malik to  _ check his deck.  _

“Here,” Malik said, slapping four cards down on the table and then spreading them out with a swipe of his hand, like he thought he was some sort of casino dealer or something. “These would fit perfectly with your deck.”

“I don’t need your fake cards,” Bakura snarled. 

“I’m sponsoring you,” Malik said, “so you could at least–”

“I’m going to play my way or not at all,” Bakura snapped, and Malik rolled his eyes as if  _ Bakura _ were the unreasonable one. 

“Whatever,” Malik said. 

Malik did bully him into attending strategic meetings, which were mostly bullshit discussions about what cards they could reasonably make. Going after ultra rare cards was pointless– even if they could somehow clone a Blue Eyes White Dragon, everyone would know it was a fake since there were famously only four in the world. 

“What about Exodia?” one of Malik’s lackeys asked, staring hungrily at the DM EXPO MADRID poster Malik had printed out and stuck to his corkboard bulletin board. 

Exodia the Forbidden One had only ever been played once in an official tournament, and by the King of Games himself. The tricky thing with Exodia not a scarcity of cards, but rather the difficulty to summon. Plenty of people boasted having full sets, and Bakura himself had two pieces he’d gotten just from booster packs. It seemed like fair game. 

“So that’s an option,” Malik concluded after Bakura shared his thoughts. “I like that. How much do full sets sell for?”

Bakura looked it up on his phone. It was a lot. The lackey who brought it up looked like he was on the verge of drooling. 

Bakura zoned out for the rest of the meeting. He wasn’t one for efforts organized by other people, and he wasn’t much of a team player in general. Malik had never expected as much before– Bakura was a great go-to guy for procurement, less so for production and distribution– but unlike with the handbags, Malik must have thought Bakura was part the demographic interested in buying knock-off cards. 

It was annoying. Bakura was going to have to communicate to him that this new arrangement wasn’t going to work out. 

After Malik finished his final dramatic speech, Bakura remained in his chair, playing Candy Crush again. One of the lackeys– not the Exodia one, but the one bald who looked like he worked a haunted house in his spare time– paused next to his chair, leaning over and staring at Bakura with bulbous eyes. 

Bakura ignored him for as long as he could, finishing the level. The guy just… stood there. Looming. 

“Can I help you?” Bakura asked, arching a brow. 

“I saw you,” the man said, and his eyes were wide and the circles under them so dark Bakura wondered if he’d sleep in the past week. “On the street.”

“That’s nice,” Bakura said, and attempted to nonchalantly go back to his game. 

“It was night,” the man said, and Bakura was seriously considering just leaving immediately and never coming back. “You didn’t move.”

That was…. A really weird statement, and Bakura kind of wondered if that meant the man had seen him asleep. He really, really didn’t want to know, though, so he continued to ignore him. 

The man shoved his own phone under his face. “Look,” he said, and Bakura had to lean back to be able to focus on what was on the screen. 

At first he thought it was a photo. It was of a man standing in front of an ATM, at night in front of a closed bank. It was clearly Bakura– the combination of white hair and dark skin weren’t exactly common, and he could just barely make out the facial scars. 

A couple, drunk and clinging to each other, passed by. Bakura remained immobile. It wasn’t a photo– he’d just been standing dead still. 

“How long is this?” Bakura asked, grabbing the phone out of the man’s hand. “When did you take this?”

“I watched you for almost an hour,” the man said, his creepy eyes boring into Bakura. 

The video was only three minutes long, but it was creepy enough. It was from the previous Sunday night– a night Bakura  _ knew _ he’d been home on, because there was nothing to do on Sunday in this city. 

“You didn’t even take any money out,” the man concluded. “You just turned and walked away, like a ghost.”

The man was giving Bakura a very expectant look. He could die waiting for an explanation, though, because Bakura had  _ no idea _ what was going on. 

“Don’t film me ever again, fucking creep,” Bakura snapped at him, and then stormed out of the office building. 

It took two buses to get home, and while he was waiting for the transfer, Bakura ducked into a corner store and bought the first bottle of alcohol he saw. Examining it on the bus, it turned out to be stupid barely-alcoholic Don Simón sangria. At home he found half a bottle of whiskey, filled it the rest of the way with sangria, and then drank it until he passed out. 

When he woke up he was still drunk, and still on his balcony floor, just now more horizontal. That was… good, maybe. He liked waking up in the same place, with the certainty his body hadn’t gone anywhere.

It was dark now, and he dragged himself back inside and nearly knocked over a lamp trying to turn it on. After some fumbling with his phone, he managed to log into his online banking. Nothing had changed since he’d paid rent by direct deposit on the first. Bakura had only ever been paid in cash and barely used his banking account; he kept the minimum in there, and then he’d periodically make deposits for rent or anything he anticipated needing to by on his debit card. 

His doppleganger or nervous breakdown or _ whatever that had been _ hadn’t been successful with the ATM, then. 

Oh a whim, he checked his history on his phone. No weird texts or calls to anyone, but his search history turned up several mysteries. 

Two days ago were a series of searches on Granada and Spain in general. They were baffling in part because– well, they were in English. Bakura spoke English perfectly well, thank you very much, but it certainly wasn’t his go-to language from random searches, especially randoms searches  _ about Spain. _

The first search was  _ Where is the Alhambra? _ And then his history showed that he’d gone from the Wikipedia page about the famous palace– which happened to be right down the road from his apartment– to the page on Granada, and then he’d searched “Granada to Narha,” which turned out to be a misspelling of the town of Nerja. 

Why the hell had he misspelled Nerja? Spanish was a phonetic language. Bakura didn’t misspell things, even drunk. 

Which– and he had to remind even himself of this–  _ he hadn’t been drunk two days ago. _ In fact, passing out drunk last night seemed to have prevented him from doing… from doing whatever  _ this _ was. 

Malik had had a few psychotic episodes back in the day. Was that what this was? Should Bakura ask him about it?

No, he wasn’t going to do that. This wasn’t affecting anyone but him, so there was no point admitting it to anyone. He’d just deal with it, the way he’d just dealt with every other problem he had. 


	2. that eternal spring is hidden (how well i know its home)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> We meet Ryou, and the plot thickens.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter features some incredibly irresponsible use of alcohol. Also, I picked another surname for Ryou, since having him ALSO be Bakura raised a lot of questions I didn't want to answer, LOL.

Bakura went about his day as usual, and as the hangover kicked in, he just dealt with that too. After he’d scoped out a copy of Magical Hats he thought he could lift, he did six shots at a bar, wandered home, and drank more of his sangría-whiskey abomination before bed. 

Getting mind-blowingly wasted right before bed seemed to solve his problem. He felt like shit when he was awake, but he also woke up where he passed out, didn’t find anything rearranged, and no more weird searches popped up on his phone. 

Then one evening he discovered his sangría-whiskey bottle, which he’d watered down with vodka several nights ago and then added two airplane bottles of tequila to last night, was sitting next to the kitchen sink, completely empty. A note was next to it, scrawled on the back of a receipt. 

_ Please stop, _ it said, in English, and Bakura stared at it for several minutes. 

Had he… had he had another episode in the night? Had he had one in the middle of the day and not noticed? Both options seemed equally alarming. 

There was a pen still sitting next to the note.  _ Que te jodas, _ Bakura wrote back, then paused upon the realization that his weird alter ego… whatever… seemed to be an English speaker. 

_ Fuck you, _ he wrote. There. Now it was international. 

He managed to not get anything useful done that day– including depositing cash and lifting that card and buying food that wasn’t the frozen pizza he’d had for months– instead choosing to pace his living room, and then his balcony. 

He didn’t care that the neighbors could see. He  _ did _ care that he seemed to have lost his mind. 

Malik’s psychosis was supposed to be because of his childhood trauma. Bakura had plenty of that, but it had never done  _ this _ before. Was that what was happening? Why now?

The ring, he realized, pausing in his pacing across the balcony. It all started with that stupid ring. 

He’d been wearing it this whole time, had been sleeping in it. He raced down the stairs and out of his apartment, not even bothering to put his shoes on, and ran down his street. The road did a hairpin turn and climbed even further up the mountain, and as it climbed the buildings shrank to tiny houses and then suddenly there were empty lots of dead grasses and cacti. Bakura stopped at the edge of one and hurled the ring as far into it as he could, leather cord and all. 

He walked back, promising himself that next time he would buy an actual khamsa hand instead (with real money!), and realized that when he’d ran out, he’d left his keys. 

His landlord lived on the same street, further down in a nicer apartment with more space. It wouldn’t take much work to go down and admit he’d locked himself out. 

He was on try number three of picking the lock with his fingernails when Malik texted him an eticket of his bus ticket to Seville for the stupid tournament. 

_ I want to see your finalized deck, _ Malik texted him two seconds later, and Bakura actually swore at his phone. 

An hour later, feeling humiliated, Bakura knocked on his landlord’s door and told the bewildered old man he’d locked himself out. His landlord shrugged it off easily, ignoring Bakura’s rumpled clothes and the distinct odor of a night of drinking and not bathing. It took the man almost twenty minutes to dig up his own key, during which he rambled to Bakura about his grandchildren. 

“That reminds me,” the landlord said, “I wanted to get Javi’s old tricycle out of storage. Ah, yes, this is perfect; I’ll just go with you and grab it.”

“Whatever,” Bakura growled, and his landlord seemed to miss the completely murderous look on his face. 

His landlord took his time strolling back up the street, and it took every ounce of Bakura’s willpower not to yell at him. The man took a couple minutes to find the key again in his pockets, and Bakura had to step back and count to ten and reflect on how this was why he couldn’t keep a normal job with a boss and coworkers. 

The landlord teetered into the apartment first, stared at the narrow staircase for a few moments, and then gave Bakura sheepish look. 

“What?” Bakura barked. 

“Could you…” the landlord said, pointing up to the hole in the wall that was his storage room, “give an old man a hand?”

The only thing that held Bakura back from swearing at the old man and chasing him out was the memory of the last place he’d lived, where he’d had four flatmates and no hot water. The old man was fine.  _ He was fine.  _

Bakura climbed into the storage room, pushing things out of the way. Maybe it was for the better it ended up like this; Bakura had rearranged things the time he’d had an Episode in here. Now his landlord would never know he’d broken the contract. 

The tricycle was easy enough to find. The red paint was faded over the metal, but it was sturdy and indestructible in the way older toys were. Bakura would have killed for something like this when he was a child. Maybe that’s why he liked games so much now– he’d had nothing but his own imagination as a kid. 

The landlord grinned at him and told him a story about his son falling off the tricycle when he was little. Bakura did not even pretend to pay attention, but the man didn’t seem to notice. When he left, Bakura poked his head back into the room with renewed interest. 

There had been a plastic bin of old games, if he remembered correctly. He rummaged through the junk, moved a child’s desk with a broken leg aside, and found it. They were mostly kid’s board games he had no interest in actually playing, but he liked the aged aesthetic of the boxes. At the bottom of the box were a bunch of old toy cars that clinked around, and a couple of Transformers. Bakura picked one up and messed around with converting it from a robot to a Volkswagon beetle.

The doors opened and closed. That was kind of cool, Bakura thought, and then he looked down at what was left in the box and dropped the toy. 

The ring was there, looking completely unassuming but feeling like a damnation. 

Maybe it was a coincidence, he thought. Maybe the ring had just been an old toy all along, and the landlord’s kid had had one. 

Except, no, this one had the same fake leather braided cord, with the cheap costume jewelry clasp, the type of metal alloy that Malik claimed he was allergic to. It was the same ring he’d just flung into a cactus patch. 

He didn’t touch it. He put the toys back. He climbed out of the storage room and went to his couch and flipped on the TV and stared numbly at it. 

He just watched whatever channel the TV was on. There were hours and hours of a show about American pawn shops, and then a ghost hunter show came. 

_ Oh, _ thought Bakura.  _ No way.  _

He switched off the TV. He got a glass of water in the kitchen, carefully not looking at the empty whiskey bottle and the note asking him to stop. 

\--

Bakura spent the next week ignoring his problems and pretending the ring was still in the toybox, and then he went to Sevilla and his problems found him. 

Or, rather, Bakura was  _ meant  _ to go to Sevilla. He had his eticket for the bus. He packed his duffle bag with clothes and a toothbrush and his cards. He dug up an old pair of earbuds for when he wanted to watch videos instead of listen to Malik nag. 

He went to the bus station. He texted Malik that he was there, and Malik texted back that he was running late, and Bakura stared at his phone trying to think of a witty comeback about how this like Malik showing up late for his own birthday party. 

Then he woke up on a bus, Malik wasn’t in the seat next to him, and the bus was pulling up to a stop that definitely wasn’t the big Sevilla bus depot. 

Bakura didn’t panic immediately. There were plenty of little towns between Granada and Sevilla that the bus could make stops at. Malik could be in the bathroom, or he might have pulled some typical bastard stunt where he put himself on one of the premium buses that served free drinks and had bigger seats. There was absolutely no reason to panic immediately. 

Passengers stood and gathered their things. A young woman patted Bakura’s shoulder and in accented English said, “This is your stop.”

Bakura stared at her. “What the hell are you talking about?”

“Oh,” she said, blinking down at him. “You speak Spanish. You asked me to tell you when we got to Nerja.”

She turned and scooted off down the aisle, and Bakura stared after her. He glanced around him, then down at his hand, which was clutching a crumpled piece of paper. It was a bus ticket that was, indeed, for Nerja. Across it in sharpie was scribbled,  _ I am so sorry. Think of it as an adventure! _

It wasn’t his handwriting. 

Bakura stood, feeling lightheaded. His duffle bag was in the overhead compartment above his seat, and he grabbed it and wandered off the bus. 

He stood around at the bus stop for a while, wondering what to do. The stop wasn’t more than a few bus-sized parking spaces on the side of the road, and a tiny booth with the bus company’s logo on it. A man sat inside, leaning back in his chair and texting away on his phone. 

Bakura checked his own phone. There were a lot of missed calls from Malik, and a bunch of furious texts, and even a couple messages from Malik’s lackeys. He turned the phone off and dumped it into his duffle bag. 

“When’s the next bus to Seville?” he asked the man in the booth. 

The next bus was at 7 AM the next morning, and it would get him into Seville after the tournament started. He asked about the next bus back to Granada, and there was one leaving in thirty minutes, but it was full. 

“Nevermind,” he told the man, and then walked away. 

Bakura hadn’t slept on the streets in years, and he didn’t really want to get back into practice. Nerja was a pretty beach town with a lot of hotels, though, so if he was lucky he could find a cheap bed in a hostel…

The best way to do that, though, was to look it up on his phone, and that would require looking at his phone. 

He stopped at a bar and ordered a beer. Then he ordered a second and started rifling through his bag for the phone. He should at least text Malik that he was alive. And maybe explain that he wasn’t going to make the tournament, although God knew he wasn’t going to explain where he’d gone or why. 

Before he found the phone, he found the ring, sitting innocently at the bottom of the bag. 

“Are you kidding me?” he muttered at it, in English, so he knew it understood. 

Predictably, the ring didn’t say anything. Bakura pulled the cord over his neck, though– might as well keep an eye on it. 

The last text from Malik read:  _ you fucking idiot bastard, ishizu wants me to call the police _

Ah, yes, calling the authorities to find a missing person seemed like something Ishizu would want to do. Malik wouldn’t, though, because Malik wasn’t in firm denial that they were both criminals who should avoid the police at all costs. 

In the end, Bakura texted Ishizu instead of her brother:  _ I’m okay, just got side tracked. _ She could be the one to inform Malik. 

Bakura looked up the price of a night in a hostel, didn’t like it, and decided he’d rather just drink in bars all night. He ordered a third drink and asked the bartender where he could charge his phone. 

At some point the bar closed and the bartender, with eyebrows raised, pointed Bakura in the direction of one that was still open. Bakura tottered out of the bar, not exactly inebriated but rather stiff from sitting for hours, and then the ring around his neck glowed hot. 

He blinked down at it. Was this him becoming conscious of his own madness?

The pendants dangling from the ring glowed a warm light, filled with a heat he could feel through his sweater, and then they hovered away from his chest and pointed down the street. 

Bakura stared down at his chest, and then down the street. Nerja was hilly like Granada, but the hills all ended in the ocean. Bakura could see the sea through the buildings, an unending expanse of darkness in the night. 

The pendants clinked together as they strained toward the ocean. Were they reaching for it? Bakura decided to follow. The new bar was down there, anyway, and maybe the ring would fling itself into the ocean and he wouldn’t have to worry about it anymore. 

The street ended with a cement patio and steps that zigzagged down to an empty beach. Bakura paused at the top of the steps, listening to the soft laps of the sea against the white sand. 

The ring tugged at his neck, and he looked down to find it pointing in another direction. He followed; the side street was all close-packed houses with tiny, carefully maintained gardens out front. The ring pointed him toward the gate of one of those houses, and Bakura only paused for a fraction of a second before hopping it. 

He ducked between the car and the wall of the next property over; the windows are all dark, but there was no point risking getting caught if someone was watching in the night. 

There was a little yard on the other side of the house. The edge there was a fence, and then a drop-off tens of feets to the sea below. Bakura slumped into one of the lawn chairs angled to watch the ocean.  _ Rich bastards, _ he thought. 

The ring pulled at him again, and he followed it in little circles around the lawn, in what felt like a truly stupid game of “hot and cold.” Then, in a corner up against the wall, it pointed straight down at the grass. 

_ What? _ Bakura thought at it.  _ Do you expect me to dig, like some sort of pirate? _

When he backed away, it pulled at him harder, and in the end Bakura sank to his knees and dug with his hands. Eventually his nails scratched something hard, and he unearthed a gold box. 

The box had the same weird Eye of Horus as the ring. An unexpected thrill of excitement ran through him, and he shoved the box into his bag and snuck back out of the yard onto the street. 

Instead of finding another bar, Bakura practically skipped down the stone stairs to the beach. He flopped down on the sand, pulled out his newly acquired treasure, and opened the box. 

He didn’t know what he had expected, but it hadn’t been toys. There were a couple of little green army men, a blue-haired troll, and what looked like gold pieces of a 3D puzzle. Buried in the puzzle pieces were a handful of coins– Bakura recognized a couple of American pieces, Egyptian pounds, and some old-fashioned Spanish pasetas– and then, in a plastic box, a set of Magic and Wizards cards. 

And they were Magic and Wizards card, not Duel Monsters: the backs of the cards were an old design Bakura barely even recognized, predating even the idea of integrating holograms. The edges of the cards were worn soft with use, and he flipped through them slowly, organizing them into piles by card type on the lid of the box. It was a good deck, a  _ really _ good deck, he thought with jealousy. It was occult themed, and he couldn’t help but think how some of these cards would help his own deck… or how his own cards would fit so well into this new deck. 

He’d found it, dug it up, taken it. It was his now, wasn’t it?

He’d have to do something to make them tournament legal– the design of the backs had changed, after all. They wouldn’t interface with holo-readers, either, although supposedly you could send your old cards into Pegasus LLC and get them modified.

When he was done marvelling over the cards, Bakura shuffled them back together and replaced them in their plastic box. He spread a shirt he’d packed over the sand and dumped the puzzle pieces over it, and tried to put them together until the sun rose. He didn’t get very far.

He stretched, then, and walked back up the stairs to buy a bus ticket back home.

\--

Bakura had not experienced many lucid dreams in his life, but he was dead certain now he was dreaming. He was on a street that smelled like rain, lined with towering town houses. It was chilly, with a damp sort of cold that got into your bones. Everything was washed out in grey, giving the street a surreal effect.

A figure waved to him from one of the houses, the glass window old and distorted. Bakura crossed the to house, letting himself in. The entryway of the house was dark, with a set of narrow stairs. The room to the left was dark, but there was a person kneeling in the shadows, working away at something on the floor in front of it, muttering under its breath. The room to the right was illuminated, so Bakura wandered in. 

“Hello, sorry about all this,” a soft voice said, and Bakura stared. 

There was a boy, seated on a couch that looked ancient but comfortable, a pot and two cups of tea set on the table in front of him. The boy was probably in his late teens, with hair as white as Bakura’s own, gentle brown eyes, and skin so pale Bakura could make out the veins in his temples. 

“You’re the one who’s been doing things,” Bakura accused. 

He didn’t have to elaborate by what he meant by ‘things.’ The boy shifted guiltily in sit seat. 

“Would you like some tea?” the boy said eventually. “I can explain.”

Bakura hesitated at the entrance to the room. He didn’t trust this… spirit, or whatever he was as far as he could throw him, and everyone knew you didn’t take food from supernatural creatures. That was rule one, he knew with absolute certainty, and up until this exact moment Bakura hadn’t even believed in the supernatural. 

Still, this was just a dream, wasn’t it? It wasn’t real tea and this wasn’t a real house. The boy patted the cushion on the couch next to him. Bakura crossed the room and slowly lowered himself into his seat. 

“My name is Ryou,” the boy said, in his quiet, soft voice. “I died in 1989. Tell me, Bakura, how did you come to find my ring?”

His voice was pleasant, warm and unintimidating. His resting face was almost a smile, making him look approachable and kind. Bakura narrowed his eyes. 

“How did you get in the ring?” he asked instead. “What the fuck were you doing with my body?”

“Ah…” Ryou said, and he had the audacity to look sadly down into his tea cup. “The ring was a gift from my father. He was an archaeologist, you see, and it was very important to me. I suppose when I died, my soul latched onto it.”

“So you father stole an artefact and you decided to haunt it?” Bakura snapped. “No wonder you think it’s okay to parade around in someone else’s body–”

“It’s not like that!” Ryou interrupted, and the air crackled like lightning had struck nearby. Bakura shut his mouth. “Please, it’s not like that at all. I didn’t realize what I was doing. I just knew, I was conscious again, and I had to get to Nerja…”

Bakura let Ryou keep talking, and the boy explained that he’d grown up outside of London with his little sister and a British father and a Japanese mother, and in the summers they rented a house in Nerja. He’d died in a house fire thirty years ago, and then he’d suddenly found himself in a strange country in a strange body. He hadn’t understood where he was or what was happening– the language and the technology confused him– but he’d figure out Bakura’s phone and had seen the signs for the Alhambra that were all over the city, and he’d pieced it together. He knew he had to go back to Nerja to collect his treasures, buried in his old vacation home’s garden. 

“Your treasures…?” Bakura repeated. “You mean your fucking toys? You just woke up one day and before anything else, you had to go get your little baby toys–”

“Would you like to play a game?” Ryou asked calmly, and the entire house melted away around them. 

Bakura was on his feet and three meters away by the time the entire house had been replaced by darkness. The cold that had clung to the air like mist seeped into Bakura’s skin, and his hair stood on end. The only thing of the room that remained was the coffee table, and Ryou gestured at it and smiled serenely.

“What about Magic and Wizards?” he asked. 

The tea set was replaced by two decks of cards, set up to play a game of Duel Monsters. They looked perfectly innocent, sitting there on the table, and yet the sight sent a shock of fear through Bakura. 

“No,” he croaked out eventually. “No, we’re not playing a game. You’re going to get the fuck out of my head, or I’m going to get so high you can’t tell what country you’re in again.”

Ryou frowned, quietly disappointed. “Well, alright,” he said eventually. “We can save the game for another time.”

Bakura woke up on the bus, his face pressed against the window. Next to him, an old woman was intently reading a paperback. The couple sitting behind him were arguing loudly. 

“Are you alright, dear?” the old woman asked when he shifted. 

He was shaking. The ring was heavy around his neck, under his shirt and warm against his skin. 

“Yeah, I’m fine,” he lied. 

\--

Malik was furious, and Bakura couldn’t even blame him. 

“You’re lucky I won,” Malik tells him over the phone. 

Bakura hadn’t been interested in the tournament before, but after listening to Malik rant and swear at him about it for half an hour, he wished he could have been there. The lackey who’d been obsessed with Exodia had snuck some last-minute copies into his deck, and the poor volunteers who’s registered them had been completely nonplussed by  _ three _ copies of Exodia. 

Malik was the regional champion now, though, and he informed Bakura he was not going to spend one penny of the prize money on him. 

“Right,” Bakura said into the phone, “because you’re going to pay Ishizu back.”

Malik made several indignant noises that weren’t real words in any language that he spoke. 

Maybe Malik didn’t feel this way because they were actual relatives, but Bakura had kept track of every penny Ishizu had loaned him and paid it all back. He appreciated that the Ishtars had looked out for him as a teenager, but he knew love and support were conditional. If things between him and the family ever went sour, he wasn’t going to come out of it with any debts to anyone. 

“Anyway,” Malik concluded when he was done yelling about betrayal and poor excuses, “I’ve come up with a way for you to make it up to me.”

“Make it up…?” Bakura frowned at his phone, which he’d left on speaker on his kitchen counter while he attempted something approaching cooking. “What do I need to make up if you won anyway?”

“You wandered into a bus station bathroom and never came back,” Malik deadpanned. “What, did you climb out the window like a child?”

Bakura rolled his eyes and went back to chopping up an onion. If Malik had been so worried about him, why had he gone ahead and gone to Sevilla when he went missing? But, then again, he’d called Ishizu about it, so…

“Fine,” Bakura agreed. “What are we doing? You need help on better strategies for Paris?”

“It’s more of a face-to-face conversation,” Malik answered, sounding smug, and they set up a meeting at Bar La Fonte.

Malik wanted him to rob the Duel Monsters Expo in Madrid. 

Bakura nearly choked on his beer and managed to splutter out, “Are you fucking kidding me?”

Malik drummed his fingers on the table between them, his stupid gold bangles clinking together with the movement. “I’ve got a guy on the inside,” he said. 

“What, are you planning a– a heist?” Bakura sneered. 

“You know you want to,” Malik said, and then leaned back in his chair and crossed his arms smugly, as if he’d already won. 

Unfortunately participating in a high-stakes card heist  _ was _ the type of thing Bakura was into. He didn’t really care too much for shoplifting, or pickpocketing, but every once in a while Malik needed him to break into a personal residence for something, and– well. Something about the extra criminality, the quest for a specific item, the increased difficulty and required skill– it made Bakura’s stomach all queasy with excitement. 

“Your guy isn’t just Rishid, is it?” Bakura muttered, and Malik smirked at him with the arrogance of man who knew he could claim his winnings whenever. 

“Of course it is,” Malik said. “He got hired as security detail.”

Maybe, if Bakura had been a better person, he would have reminded Malik that Rishid had been trying to go legit since they moved out and left Madrid, and maybe he would have pointed out that just because Rishid would do anything for Malik, it didn’t mean Malik should take advantage of it. 

Bakura wasn’t a very good person, though, and he’d never been as close with Rishid, so he shrugged it off. 

“I want half my payment upfront,” Bakura said, “and no cutting costs this time.”

“Half–” Malik gagged. “We haven’t even negotiated–”

They argued for hours, and Malik left mumbling curses on Bakura’s family while Bakura smirked after him. He swirled the last few sips of his beer– now room temperature and flat– and wondered if he could convince Malik to put him up in a fancy hotel in Madrid. He deserved it, didn’t he?

He hadn’t told Malik about why he’d skipped the tournament. He’d said, “I had something come up,” and left it. No need for Malik to think he was losing his mind or– even worse– believe him when he said he was being haunted. 

Bakura drained the glass and pulled the ring out from under his shirt, examining it in the dull light of the bar. It was pretty intricately made, all shiny metal with moving parts that dangled freely. Bakura thought about the old artefacts he’d seen in museums, rusted and worn away and broken with time. Was this really from ancient Egypt? Had Ryou’s father restored it before he’d sent it back?

Bakura felt a brief, blinding rage at the thought. Ishizu was always going to meetings and conferences where she’d argue about returning looted artefacts to Egypt, or at least giving Egypt control over their curation. He shoved the feeling aside quickly; Bakura didn’t really care about old junk, or his home country and its history. He was a thief himself; he didn’t care if some old British man was too. 

He very consciously unclenched his fist and dropped the ring. The cord tugged at the back of his neck as it fell. 

As he left the bar, the ring glowed warm even through his shirt, and he blinked down at where it was pointing. The narrow street went downhill, which meant away from his home. 

Bakura followed the ring all the way to a second-hand shop. The shop was the type of place where people’s things went to die– broken rotary phones, rusted candlesticks without matches, electronics with plugs so old they didn’t fit standard European outlets, personal items that were meaningless to customers, all strewn across collapsable tables and covered in dust. The ring directed him to a table filled with cases of old photos and poster cards, arranged by the order they’d arrived at the shop instead of anything useful. 

Back when he’d lived in Madrid, this was the type of place Ishizu loved to drag him along to, with the promise of buying him lunch or a drink at the end. Ishizu was in love with digging through people’s old photos and postcards and diaries, the older the better. Bakura imagined she was interested in the human side of old junk, wondering how they lived in 1936, right before the Spanish Civil War, or what Madrid looked like during World War II. Bakura pretended to be indifferent and annoyed by these excursion, but she must have sensed he was interested too– less with the people, and more with the fun of finding something worth keeping in the midst of all the junk. 

Bakura flipped through the photos, not really taking them in. There were some truly old black-and-white ones, from someone’s trip to Barcelona, that had nearly-illegible writing scrolled across the back of them. The next stack was more recent– color, but not digital– and looked like someone else’s vacation. The photos were of a family at cafes in the sun, the children posing with a statue, and then blurry photos of the inside of a cave. 

The cave was clearly set up for tourists– the lighting was good, the paths were clear, and there were obviously other tourists wandering around in the background. Bakura flipped through them quickly, bored and thinking of giving up, when the ring suddenly burned so hot he jumped. 

The photo in his hand was of the mother of the family, posing cheerfully in front of some geological formation. Bakura thought the photo poor: the wall of stalactites or stalagmites or whatever they were was mostly blocked by another family, posing for their own photo. 

He squinted down at the photo. The other family of three was in profile, obviously looking toward another camera, but the little girl was turned toward the person taking this photo, a curious look frozen on her face forever. She was dressed in a frilly pink dress, her nearly-white hair pulled back in braid, and around her neck was a gold necklace with the Eye of Horus. 

Bakura heard himself exhale at the realization. The girl was holding the hand of a dark-haired woman he assumed to be the mother, and on the other side of the woman was a another child. Bakura couldn’t see the child’s face, but he could see the mass of white hair, and he could see the same soft brown eyes as Ryou in the face of the little girl. 

“No way,” he actually breathed, outloud, in public. This was an impossibility. He flipped the photo over. Nothing. He went through the other photos in the stack and found one captioned in pen:  _ Cuevas de Nerja, 1985. _

The elderly shopkeeper seemed confused by Bakura’s need to buy the single photo. He paid twenty cents for it and got directions to the nearest bus stop. While he waited, he googled.

His google search was completely dependent on the idea that there could only be so many British boys named Ryou who died 1989. He had to go through a lot of links and online archives and look up the English word for “obituary,” but he found it. There was a photo and everything. 

Ryou was a real person, who really died in 1989, of smoke inhalation in a terrible accident. The obituary did not go into much details, except mentioning Ryou’s school and that he was survived by his father. Bakura’s next question, then, was what happened to the mother and sister?

Now that he had a town and a surname– Hawkins– googling them was easier. Bakura missed his stop, sitting on the bus and reading the news article about their death. 

The article wasn’t very long– the gist of it was more a call to better road signage. A mother and her young daughter, identified as Keiko and Amane, had died in a fatal car accident making a blind turn, and been hit at full-speed by an oncoming van. The mother had died instantly, and the little girl passed in transit to the hospital. Ryou had also been in the car, the sole survivor. 

Bakura did not know where the father was. 

When he finally arrived home, Bakura tucked the photo into the bin of take-out menus he kept, and then pulled some left-over chicken and rice from the fridge. He flopped down on his couch with it, turned on the TV for background noise, and pulled up the website for the exhibition center that was hosting the Duel Monsters Expo. 

The exhibition center was fancy, with an ultra-modern, all-glass front and exhibition spaces that boasted all sort of fancy screens and holo-projectors. Malik would get him plans for the building, and reports from Rishid on what the security would be like, so for now Bakura was just window shopping. 

Malik had given him a list of all the cards on display, with little ticks next to the ones he wanted. They were mostly limited edition cards– the kinds of things people would pay a lot for collection purposes– along with some popular rare cards. Malik had also put an exclamation mark next to a handful of cards that weren’t worth stealing but that he was personally excited to see. The one Blue Eyes White Dragon that wasn’t Seto Kaiba’s was on display, for example, along with the three Egyptian God Cards that were meant to be prizes for this year’s championship. 

There was also a “first print” set of Exodia, and then the centerpiece was a brand new card, ‘Zorc Necrophades.’ They hadn’t even released a photo yet, or any information besides the name and that there was only one in the world, and there were a lot of rumors going around online. The prevalent one was that Zorc was to match the God Cards, as part of a “divinity” set. Personally, Bakura thought this was bullshit. What kind of a god was named ‘Zorc’?

He scrolled back to the God Cards, took a screenshot of the Winged Dragon of Ra– the prize for the European League– and sent it to Malik. 

_ This could be you, _ he texted. Then he added:  _ Caw, caw.  _

Instead of taking the bait, Malik answered, _ Once, Ra created. Now, he destroys.  _

Bakura answered, _ A one-way ride on the boat to the afterlife.  _

_ Ishizu would be so proud of us.  _

Ishizu would definitely not be proud. Bakura snickered and got up to wash to his bowl and fork. 

\--

Despite all of Bakura’s pestering, Malik did not spring for plane tickets to Madrid. He did get them the premium bus, though, which meant a smiling woman offered them each of them an airplane sized bottle of wine. 

“This better than a plane,” Malik said, pouring his bottle into a plastic cup. “More leg room.”

They talked about dumb shit for a while, and then Malik turned to the tablet embedded in the back of the seat in front of him and put on a movie. Ten minutes later, he was asleep and snoring softly. Bakura rolled his eyes and turned toward the window. 

_ ...Madrid? _ A voice asked, and Bakura nearly jumped out of his skin. 

Malik was still asleep. Bakura looked around, paranoid. The voice had been  _ right there, _ on the back of his neck. 

The ring tugged at his neck, pointing towards the bathroom stall at the back of the bus. 

“Ugh,” Bakura grunted at it, then climbed over Malik and went in. 

There wasn’t anything really special about the bathroom, except that there was a tiny hole in the floor through which Bakura could watch the pavement zooming by underneath. He watched it for a few seconds, and then out of the corner of his eye, someone waved to him. 

There was a small mirror over the sink, and his reflection was waving at him, wearing an expression that was much friendlier than any face Bakura ever made. 

“What the fuck,” he said to it.

_ I’m so sorry to bother,  _ the voice at the back of his neck said,  _ but you seemed like you needed a visual.  _

“What do you want?” Bakura snapped. 

_ Are we going to Madrid? _ Ryou asked. 

“What does it look like, dipshit?” Bakura snapped back. 

_ Well, I don’t speak Spanish– _ Ryou started to say. 

“I don’t care,” Bakura answered, and he didn’t. He hadn’t spoken any Spanish when he’d first come to Spain, either, but he’d been speaking it within months. It was survival. “What do you want?”

_ Ah, well,  _ Ryou stammered out,  _ I just wanted to know what was going on… _

Ryou kept rambling. He had gathered from context that Bakura and Malik were going to this card expo, but now they were on a bus to Madrid five days early. He politely did not mention any criminal activities. 

“We grew up in Madrid,” Bakura said finally. “We’re going to visit some people.”

_ O-oh… I thought you were, um, from a bit further away….  _

Bakura’s reflection squirmed uncomfortably. Bakura raised his eyebrows at it. He supposed he could tell Ryou his whole sad history, the combination of natural disaster and governmental neglect that destroyed Kul Elna, being homeless on the streets, how he got lucky and found a way to leave. 

He didn’t owe Ryou that, though. He didn’t owe Ryou anything. 

“If that’s all,” Bakura said, voice dripping with sarcasm. 

_ You brought my cards, _ Ryou said. 

“I’m going to a card show,” Bakura said. “And they’re ancient. Maybe I’ll sell them.”

The line of Ryou’s face– or rather, Bakura’s face all perverted to be Ryou’s– hardened and his smashed his lips down into a thin line. 

Bakura wasn’t going to sell them, because they were a good deck and he wanted them, but Ryou didn’t have to know that. Bakura went back to his seat and spent the rest of the bus ride watching a bad action movie. 

Being back in Madrid was weird. Most of it was exactly the same, and yet some of it was completely different. Shops had closed and reopened in new places. There was a Taco Bell now, with a line down the sidewalk. The bus came on time, a rare occasion in Bakura’s teenagedom. The man who used to sit outside that bar and jeer at passing women was gone. People in his old neighborhood didn’t recognize him, didn’t give him wary eyes. 

Ishizu was the same, at least. She opened the door before Malik could knock and gestured them inside without saying a word. 

She’d moved since Bakura had been here last. Same neighborhood, but a remodeled flat on a different block. It was smaller than the Ishtars’ old place, but the kitchen appliances looked like they’d all work. 

“You can fight over who gets the couch,” Ishizu said breezily, leading them into the living room. 

“Shouldn’t I,” Malik started, “your own flesh and blood, get the cou–”

“No,” Ishizu interrupted. Her voice was a deadpan, but the corners of her mouth twitched upward. “I made snacks.”

She pointed at a bag of potato chips on the coffee table. She hadn’t even bothered to pour the bag into the empty bowl next to it. 

“God I missed your cooking,” Malik said, dropping his bag on the floor and flopping onto the couch. It was covered by a soft blue sheet. 

“Where’s Rishid?” Bakura asked, sinking down into an armchair. 

“Your card expo has him working overtime,” Ishizu said, tucking a strand of hair behind her ear. “I might go to one of the lectures at it. It’s about the ancient game the cards are based on.”

Bakura relaxed back into the chair and kicked off his shoes while Ishizu talked about Ancient Egyptian games. He’d heard a lot about their board games from her before; Ishizu even had some. She could play at being a pretentious historian all she wanted, but they all knew she was just a gaming nerd underneath it all. 

Bakura probably only had so much respect for other humans in him, and he reserved most of it for Ishizu. Ishizu had been the one to carry her brothers out of their shit town once their crazy dad bit the dust, the one who’d worked her ass off to feed them and pay rent and put Malik through school. Even with two brothers to look out for, she’d always found time to help Bakura– she’d helped him with his visas, yelled at him when he’d tried to drop out of high school, had let him crash on her couch twice when he’d been evicted.

Still, he propped his bare feet on her coffee table and made a big show of yawning to get her attention. “What’s for dinner?”

Ishizu’s lip twitched as she eyed his feet. “Malik is going to treat us.”

“What?” Malik yelped, sitting up. 

“Are you not a successful business owner?” Ishizu asked sweetly as she reached forward and shoved Bakura’s feet off her table. 

Malik pouted. Ishizu undoubtedly knew what Malik did for a living, but it was an unspoken rule between them not to talk about it. 

Ishizu could not follow a recipe to save her life, but the kitchen counter had three different take out menus laid out, side by side, perfectly parallel to each other. She had a notepad of her and Rishid’s orders from each place.

“Pick whatever you want,” she said her airy, soft voice. Her tone was quiet but left no room for questioning, and she pressed the notepad into Malik’s chest. “Then bring it back here.”

“I swear she gets more anal retentive every year,” Malik muttered as she waltzed away. 

“It’s because she doesn’t have you to pick up from the police anymore,” Bakura answered, picking up one of the menus. 

“That happened _ once.” _

Dinner was actually nice. Bakura couldn’t say he enjoyed his youth, but watching Ishizu and Malik tease each other reminded him of the handful of good parts. Rishid rolled in close to one AM, after they’d split a bottle of sweet liqueur between the three of them, and Ishizu did her trick of leaping up to open the door before he could get his keys in. 

Ishizu might be a little bit clairvoyant. They weren’t sure. 

Rishid was quiet as always, and Bakura let himself melt into the couch while Malik got up to greet him properly. Bakura’s eyelids drooped, and he answered Rishid’s polite questions about his trip with single word answers. Next thing he knew, he was horizontal across the couch and Malik was poking him in the size and griping about stealing the couch. 

“Fuck off,” Bakura grumbled, smacking Malik’s hand away. 

“I get it tomorrow then,” Malik snapped, before stomping off, making a lot of noise as he moved around the room, presumably getting ready to sleep in one of the armchairs. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I have never found old personal photos for sale in the US, but I definitely did in Spain. One of my friends collected them, even.


	3. i know not its beginning as it hasn’t one (but i know every beginning comes from it)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> We learn more about Ryou, and there's a Card Heist.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Ummm some notes:  
-I don't know a goddamn thing about archaeology.  
-I got creative with the card game rules. I feel this is canon-typical shenanigans.  
-I used "Arthur Hawkins" as Ryou's father's name, simply to be using a canon name. Perhaps this is... another role swap.......? Anyway, I'm not sure I like it, and I might go back in and change it at a later date. Let me know what you think if you have an opinion on it. 
> 
> ALSO: Sliiiight violence warning. There's some vaguely described gore towards the end, which I probably wouldn't even warn for in a more violence-heavy fandom. But this is YGO, so..........

Bakura woke to the sound of Ishizu gently typing, her work desk set up in the corner of the living room. He rolled off the coach as quietly as he could, and she barely turned her head to acknowledge him. Malik was draped over the bigger of the two armchairs, both legs thrown over one arm. 

Bakura showered and dressed. While he was brushing his teeth, his reflection relaxed into Ryou’s stupid sad expression and said,  _ This isn’t my first time in Madrid.  _

Bakura spat into the sink and ignored him. 

He spent the morning wandering around the old neighborhood with Malik, and then Malik headed back home to eat lunch with his family while Bakura wandered off to fend for himself. It wasn’t that Bakura wouldn’t have been welcome to eat with the Ishtars; it was just that they weren’t  _ his _ family, and he wasn’t theirs. They had their fucked up past together, and he was the only one left from his own fucked up past.

Bakura was scanning the menu options of a restaurant when Ryou asked,  _ Take a walk with me?  _

Bakura’s feet moved on their own. 

“What the fuck are you doing?” he yelled. He grabbed for a trash bin on the sidewalk, but then control of his arms was also gently taken from him. “Stop it!”

_ I’m so sorry, _ Ryou gently soothed him,  _ But I want to show you something, and people are staring.  _

Bakura couldn’t move his mouth to scream anymore. 

He was still there, though, and he watched as Ryou fished his phone out of his pocket and opened the map feature. It took him a couple tries– smartphones were definitely not available in the 80s– but then he successfully charted a course to Temple Debod. 

_ Do you think that’s funny? _ Bakura thought very hard at Ryou. Ryou didn’t respond.

Temple Debod was an old Egyptian temple, disassembled in Aswan and then reassembled in Madrid, as a gift from Egypt to Spain. It was actually quite beautiful, set in a pretty park with a reflecting pond, and sunsets lit up the whole temple in warm light. Bakura probably would have liked it if people weren’t always asking him if he’d visited there yet when he told them where he was from. 

The temple was dedicated to the goddess Isis, who Ishizu was named for.  _ Obviously _ Bakura had been there, and heard Ishizu’s lectures on it, and smoked pot on the hill next to it like any young adult. 

Ryou walked them the whole way there, and the walk was almost forty-five minutes. When the temple finally came into sight, Ryou started internally monologuing about it to Bakura. 

_ My father loved Egypt, you know, _ Ryou said, and Bakura thought back as loud as he could,  _ Oh, is that why he stole from it? _

_ He spent all his time there, _ Ryou continued, either unaware of Bakura’s angry thoughts or ignoring them.  _ He was never home with us, and he never took us with him. But we always had the summer trip to Spain.  _

Temple Debod sat on an island in the middle of the square reflecting pond, right on the precipice of a steep hill that overlooked Madrid. Ryou paced around the pond, turning his head to admire the two stone arches and the building of the temple itself. 

_ Or at least, we  _ used _ to have the summer trip to Spain, _ Ryou ambled on.  _ He started flying in with us and then leaving after a week or two. One time, he took us up to Madrid with him before he flew out, and he took us here. _

Ryou stopped at the edge of the hill, pausing to stare out over the city. Bakura could feel the wind playing with his hair, and Ryou reached up and tucked it behind his ear. 

_ This is the closest he ever got to taking us with him to Egypt, _ Ryou concluded.  _ Then we stopped coming to Spain all together.  _

_ You know, _ Bakura practically bellowed within his own mind,  _ I _ ** _ really _ ** _ don’t care.  _

_ I wish you were more sympathetic, _ Ryou replied, proving that he could hear him the whole time.  _ We’re in this together, you know.  _

_ I don’t really see how we are, _ Bakura answered snidely.  _ You’re basically a parasite.  _

Bakura felt his vocal chords hum as Ryou let out a nonverbal reply. He walked them up to the temple then, getting in the line to go inside. Ryou’s body language was different from Bakura’s: he shuffled his feet and picked at Bakura’s cuticles and didn’t slouch at all. 

When they were inside the temple, looking at all the stone carvings behind glass, Ryou asked,  _ Do you have any siblings? _

Bakura didn’t answer. He didn’t owe this– this ghost, or whatever– anything. Ryou asked him again, and again, and then he opened Bakura’s phone and opened his text messages to Ishizu. 

_ I wonder what I could say,  _ Ryou said,  _ to make her kick you out? _

If Bakura had control of his body, he’d roll his eyes. There was nothing Ryou could say, probably, because Bakura had already called Ishizu and bitch and whore to her face and she’d just stared him down and told him to get his shit together. If anything, Ryou would just summon Ishizu  _ to _ them, to deliver a lecture. He could hear her already:  _ “Perhaps you use these insults because you are too uncreative to think of better ones and too unobservant to pick one that hurts.”  _ Not to mention that Malik would sock him in the face if he ever found out, and then demand Bakura help one of his schemes without pay to “make up for it.” 

Still, Bakura would prefer not to insult one of the only people who gave a shit about him. 

_ You don’t even speak Spanish, _ he thought at Ryou, finally. He spoke Arabic with the Ishtars, mostly, and if Ryou didn’t know any Spanish after coming here every summer, then he definitely didn’t know any Arabic either. 

_ She has English textbooks, _ Ryou said, and started typing a very mean message. 

Ishizu was in fact fluent in four languages, including English, and could definitely lecture him in all four of them. She’d understand every last nuance of what Ryou was typing, including that it was wildly out of character for Bakura. That might actually lead to a lot of questions he didn’t want to answer. 

_ I don’t have any family, _ Bakura finally answered. 

_ Oh, I’m so sorry, that’s such a shame, _ Ryou said, exiting the temple, and he sounded annoyingly sincere. _ I had a sister, before. Her name was Amane. I loved her dearly. _

Bakura didn’t say anything. He knew Amane passed away before Ryou, and surely Ryou knew that he knew, if he’d noticed a little detail like Ishizu’s textbooks. 

Ryou kept going, his voice filling with longing as he sat on the edge of the reflecting pool.  _ I used to buy Magic and Wizards booster packs on the way home from school, and we’d close our eyes while we opened them and split the pack up between us. She loved them so much. She would beg our father to send back the tablets the game is based on, and instead he sent us jewelry. _

Ryou ran Bakura’s fingers around the curves of the ring as he related this story, leaning back casually on his free hand. From the outside, to all the tourists gawking around, he must have seemed downright contemplative.  _ _

_ I don’t care, _ Bakura said finally, and he didn’t. Ryou’s daddy issues and a little girl who’d died in another country years ago didn’t have anything to do with Bakura. 

_ I thought you wouldn’t, _ Ryou replied and sighed audibly.  _ You’re just like our father. You don’t care about anyone but yourself.  _

Bakura didn’t really see the connection. It’s not like Bakura had committed himself to marriage and screaming children demanding his attention. He stole and he cheated and and he lied and he was mean and blunt, but never when it  _ mattered. _ Never to  _ people _ who mattered. 

Then, suddenly, Bakura was back in control of his body, and the arm that was supporting his weight slipped and he fell backwards into the reflecting pool. He pulled himself out of it, snarling and soaked, to find a policeman hovered over him with raised eyebrows. 

“Entering the pool is prohibited,” the policeman said. 

“I fell,” Bakura answered tightly, climbing out. 

“Where are you from? Can I see your ID?” the policeman asked, and Bakura had to work extra hard to not to yell at him. 

After showing off his residency card and disentangling himself from the police, Bakura treated himself to a rare steak for lunch, because he deserved it after all that. His server stared at his wet clothes and the sloshing sounds his shoes made, but wisely didn’t comment. After pocketing his change from the bill, Bakura paused. He pulled the ring from around his neck, dropped it on the table, and left. 

Served that guy right. 

\--

Predictably, the ring came back, appearing in his duffle bag as he searched through it for a clean shirt the next morning. Bakura refused to put it on, and then it was several hours later and he was in Retiro Park and didn’t remember how he’d gotten there. 

He convinced Malik to get piss-drunk with him that night. He woke up on the kitchen floor with Rishid peering down at him. 

“You’ve been behaving strangely,” Rishid said. 

“Eh?” Bakura said, squinting. The light was too bright. It hurt his head. 

“You tried to call the police on yourself,” Rishid said. “For noise disturbance.”

Bakura grunted and pulled his shirt up over his head. Rishid’s shadow passed as he stepped over him, and Bakura winced as Rishid banged metal together setting up the stove-top coffee maker. 

“It didn’t work,” Rishid continued. “They didn’t have anyone who spoke English. I’ve never heard you say ‘please’ so many times before. You take your coffee with milk, right?”

“Shove it up your ass,” Bakura said through his shirt. 

“Ah, he’s back,” Ishizu called from the other room. 

\--

Bakura wore the ring. He didn’t want to, but he came here to do a job, and he didn’t need the distraction of a petty vengeance war with a ghost. 

The card expo was a two day affair, and Bakura spent the first day roaming between card displays in what was colloquially known as “casing the joint.” Malik didn’t go with him, but he knew he was there, probably with his face pressed up against the glass of some other display. 

He ignored the amateur tournament and the panels about card tactics, but waited in line almost an hour to have his cards appraised. When he got to the front and dropped his cards down on a table, the skinny man sitting behind it lit up. 

“Oh!” the man said. “A classic occult deck. I haven’t seen one of these since I was a teen…”

The man prattled on about old school Magic and Wizards. The deck was well-formed, if not outdated in its strategy. Several of the key cards were banned in tournament use, or easily negated by newer cards. Still, some of the cards were individually worth hundreds of euros. 

“But as a whole…” The man’s eyes were practically luminescent. “This is a real treasure.”

“Uh-huh,” Bakura said, tapping his fingers against the fold-up table between them. “What do I have to do to make it tournament ready?”

The man pressed his lips together, clearly disapproving. “I don’t know why you’d want to,” the man said, voice tight as if he disapproved of even asking, “But Pegasus LLC will replace the backs of older cards for holo-projector compatible ones for about fifteen euros a piece–”

_ “Fifteen euros?” _ Bakura repeated. “For  _ one _ card?”

“Well– yes,” the man said. “But I don’t see why you’d want to; this is obviously a collector’s deck, and you’d devalue it...”

Bakura rolled his eyes and zoned out for the rest of the spiel. Clearly getting the cards updated was a money-making scam. As much as he liked Ryou’s cards, he didn’t like them _ that  _ much. 

He went to the lecture Ishizu had been interested in, in part because he before he’d drunkenly passed out on her kitchen floor, he’d also vomited in her shower, and in part because it was being given by Pegasus J. Crawford himself. He slumped down in a chair next to Ishizu, and she flashed him a small smile, sitting ramrod straight in her own seat. 

Pegasus was an entertaining speaker, Bakura would give him that. He could feel even Ryou, suddenly restless in the back of his mind, paying rapt attention to the man. 

“Egypt boasted some of the best games in the ancient world,” Pegasus started, going through an overview of mehen and senet and hounds and jackals, flipping through photos of each game of the screen behind him. He talked about ancient dice made of animal knuckles. Ishizu nodded along, eyes laser-focused on the explanations she could give in her sleep. 

“Now, before I was a toymaker, I was a budding archaeology student with a twinkle in my eye,” Pegasus said, winking exaggeratedly at the audience. “In fact, I met my dear late wife on a dig, and she turned me onto an interesting discovery…”

The ‘Monster Tablets,’ as they’d been nicknamed, were found in a single tomb of a teenaged pharaoh. They’d been carefully carved in stone slabs just small enough to reasonably be carried and easily transported. The walls of the tomb had included depictions of the pharaoh and members of his palace holding the tablets. 

“This was an incredibly unique discovery,” Pegasus said. “No one had seen anything like it. My collaborator, Dr. Hawkins, hypothesized they were–”

Bakura missed what the original hypothesis was, exactly, because the ring hanging around his neck suddenly  _ stabbed _ him. 

Bakura hissed with pain, and Ishizu looked at him sharply and stomped on his foot. He scowled back at her, opening his mouth to quietly swear at her, but she was already refocused on whatever Pegasus was saying about ‘the protective amulet hypothesis.’

_ I need a protective amulet from  _ ** _her,_ ** Bakura thought, and Ryou replied in rush,  _ That’s my father! _

Ryou snapped Bakura’s head up and opened his eyes wide to ogle at the photo of a group of white people in khaki on the screen. Bakura recognized the younger Pegasus, his arm around a pretty blond lady who must have been his dead wife. There were more, happy people crowded around him, but Ryou was focused on a man standing just slightly too far away from the rest of the group to seem like a part of it, frowning slightly at the camera. Pegasus identified the man as Dr. Arthur Hawkins.

Bakura did not have control of his head, but he did have control of his hands, and he dug his fingernails into the side of his face. 

_ Ow, _ Ryou said, sounding annoyed. Pegasus moved on to another slide, and Ryou let Bakura have control back. Bakura shook his head and popped his neck. 

“What’s wrong with you?” Ishizu whispered, her eyes still focused on the lecture. “Are you ill?”

“I’m fine,” Bakura replied through gritted teeth. 

Pegasus talked about how he’d studied the context of the tablets, and how there had been an unusual number of games and toys in the tomb, and some other archaeological mumbo jumbo that must have been legit, based on how Ishizu’s head was bobbing along to it. Pegasus and his wife had finally concluded that the “protective tablets” for an “unknown ritual” were actually just an elaborate game. 

“We called him the Game King– you could say our young pharaoh was the world’s first gamer,” Pegasus joked. “We think that he himself, or maybe someone close to him, invented the game. Since we’ve never found other tablets, it’s possible he had the only set, and the game started and ended with him. The ultimate collector’s deck, you could say.”

Laughter rippled through the audience. 

Pegasus then segued into some sort of weird mysticism about summoning monsters from the afterlife and the Book of the Dead and believing the tablets had their own souls, and Ishizu pursed her lips. Not so legit, then. 

_ He thought they could summon the dead, _ Ryou said, clearly not picking up on Ishizu’s annoyed body language.  _ I read a lot about it. His wife died suddenly, and he got fixated on the cards. That’s why there’s so many occult ones. _

Pegasus then finished with a brief overview of how he’d turned the Monster Tablets into a highly profitable game, and opened the floor to questions. Ishizu’s hand shot into the air. 

_ I didn’t know my father knew him,  _ Ryou said contemplatively. 

_ You’re so chatty today,  _ Bakura thought back at him,  _ and yet no apology for stabbing me.  _

_ Oh, did I? _ Ryou asked, voice dripping with concern and pity, and Bakura immediately regretted the jab.  _ Bakura, I am so sorry, I don’t always have control– _

Ishizu asked a question about a different dig that was lost on Bakura and probably everyone else in the audience, but made Pegasus light up. When the panel ended, Ishizu practically jumped over the rows of chairs to get to the front to pester Pegasus with more questions, and Bakura slinked out of the expo. 

He was to meet with Malik and Rishid. They had work, after all. 

\--

The Saturday morning ceremony revealed the new card. Bakura did not actually go, but Malik gave him the run down via WhatsApp. The card was indeed meant to match the God Cards, but it wasn’t an actual Egyptian God. 

Ishizu would be so disappointed, Malik texted, if only her disappointment in Pegasus and his weird cards-as-tools-of-wizards weren’t already rock bottom. 

(“Sometimes a game is just a game,” Ishizu had ranted over dinner.)

The new card, Zorc Necrophades, had a vaguely Egyptian look to it, if your entire understanding of Egypt came from the  _ The Mummy  _ movie franchise. Then again, Pegasus had a live feed to a display of the tablet it was based on playing on a projector behind the card’s case, so maybe it wasn’t completely off. 

_ I would like to see it, _ Ryou said.  _ Please? _

Ryou was lucky Bakura liked Duel Monsters enough that he wanted to see the card himself more than he wanted to prevent Ryou from getting his way. 

_ When the crowd dies down, _ he promised. 

He wandered the displays a bit aimlessly. He’d seen all of them yesterday, but the bulk of today’s visitors were crammed into the Zorc Necrophades room, so he could spend more time looking at the displays he wanted. 

He spent a long time in a room dedicated to Duel Monsters spin off games. Something called  _ Dungeon Dice _ was currently popular in Japan, and there was a case of  _ Capsule Monsters _ that featured figurines Bakura had seen in bins in the back of game shops. 

_ Oh, I played that, _ Ryou suddenly said.  _ There was a machine outside the chemist down the street that you could buy them from.  _

Unfortunately, Bakura liked games, and he couldn’t stop himself from asking,  _ How do you play? _

It was a bit like checkers, or maybe chess, Ryou explained, except that all the pieces had special abilities. He pointed out the figurines he had, and then all the figurines his sister had collected. 

_ She always won, _ he finished, sounding wistful.  _ She wasn’t very good at Magic and Wizards, but she was great at Capsule Monsters.  _

_ Well, _ Bakura reasoned, _ it’s a kid’s game, and she was a kid.  _

_ Did they have it in Egypt? _ Ryou asked.  _ While you were asleep, I read about the world champion playing Duel Monsters as a kid, so I know you had the card game.  _

Bakura was surprised to discover he was in a good mood and answered,  _ I wouldn’t know. I grew up in a small rural community; we didn’t really get pop culture fads. _

_ Oh, _ Ryou said.  _ If you don’t mind me saying, you don’t seem at all like a country boy.  _

Bakura snorted and moved on to a display of old Magic and Wizards toys.  _ A natural disaster wiped out the town and I got moved to the city, _ he said.  _ You turn into a city kid real fast when you’ve got nothing else.  _

He didn’t mention the complete lack of government response to the disaster, didn’t mention his people dying as infrastructure that the government had neglected collapsed, didn’t mention clinging on to life by a hair for days before anyone came to help. As far as he could tell, Kul Elna and his entire family had disappeared from a map one day, and it didn’t even make national news. 

Ryou accepted his short answer, though, and started pointing out all the toys he had, seizing control of Bakura’s hand to do so. 

_ Ah! Sorry! _ He said, dropping the hand when Bakura snarled at it.  _ I forgot you don’t like that.  _

_ Did you really have all of these? _ Bakura asked snidely. _ Is that what it’s like to grow up rich? You have dolls instead of friends? _

_ I had friends,  _ Ryou sniffed, and then went quiet. 

Ryou stayed silent when Bakura finally went into the Zorc display room, although Bakra knew he was definitely there, peering out from behind his eyes. It was a creepy sort of sensation, being able to feeling another soul lurking in the back of his mind, and Bakura attempted to ignore him by concentrating as hard as he could on Zorc Necrophades’s flavor text. 

_ An evil god, Zorc Necrophades was born from the pain of mankind.  _

The card was, of course, the centerpiece of the room, but there were some other cards on display, presumably to illustrate support cards for the Zorc Necrophades deck you could never have. Some of them were newly released and obviously meant to integrate into other types of decks as well, but a case in the back had a bunch of older cards with the Magic and Wizards backs. 

_ Did you have any of these? _ Bakura asked, because he could still feel Ryou sitting there, drinking it all in. 

Ryou didn’t say anything, and Bakra got the distinct impression he was pouting. Ryou had an occult themed deck, which didn’t necessarily jive with an Ancient Egypt themed deck, except for of course in the large area of overlap where the Ancient Egyptians were obsessed with death. Pegasus, at least, had been somewhat correct about that. 

Bakura tapped the glass over a card he thought would have fit with Ryou’s deck and said,  _ What about this one? _

Bakura liked this one, actually. It was called Diabound and it was an effect monster that could replicate the effects on any other monster on the field. That was the kind of strategy that he liked– flexible, required a certain amount of cleverness, and so strong it had undoubtedly been banned from tournament use by now. Maybe he’d look into getting one for his “collector’s deck” he couldn’t play in any tournaments. 

_ Don’t go changing my deck, _ Ryou snapped, and Bakura felt a grin tug across his face. 

_ Now who’s being rude? _ Bakura asked.  _ I’m just making a suggestion, just like you make suggestions to move my body wherever you please.  _

He could feel Ryou fuming in the back of his mind for the rest of the day. Knowing he was there was still creepy and made his skin crawl, but the fact that he’d gotten under Ryou’s metaphorical skin as well gave him a deep sense of satisfaction. 

The closing ceremony was an exhibition duel between Atem, world champion, and the North American champion, Mai Valentine. Bakura wondered how much they were getting paid to tour around Europe and play card games, and if Malik would be able to do the same if he won the European championship. Maybe Bakura should have tried harder to make it to that tournament. 

Bakura still thought Atem was an asshole, but even so he elbowed his way to the front of the crowd. Atem was shorter in person than Bakura expected, and his hair looked even more ridiculous. Bakura didn’t know much about this Mai Valentine woman, but she wasn’t exactly normal-looking herself, with wild blonde hair and an outfit that featured thigh-high boots and a corset. 

_ They’re like celebrities, _ Ryou observed when the woman blew a kiss to the crowd and incited a massive and excited roar. Ryou sounded a bit awed by the concept. _ I used to get bullied for bringing cards to school.  _

Bakura almost said:  _ So then you  _ ** _didn’t _ ** _ have any friends.  _ But then Atem played his first card, and a giant holographic monster appeared on the field, and the crowd lost their shit screaming again. 

_ Oh! _ Ryou exclaimed.  _ I read that they could– oh, wow, it’s like Star Trek– _

_ You can do this at any old shopping mall, _ Bakura thought, fighting back a smirk. _ Maybe I’ll show you.  _

Bakura didn’t like Atem, but he had to admit he’d earned his title as King of Games. This Mai woman was also good, but Atem was better. She must have known this, as she started off aggressive and didn’t let up. She cooed flirtatious taunts at him, batting her eyes and winking, and Bakura wasn’t sure if it was entirely for the crowded or part of some sort of mind game. Either way, Atem stayed cool, and when he finally played his Dark Magician, the crowd went absolutely wild. 

“This is the beginning of the end for you,” Atem announced, in his completely over dramatic voice that Malik regularly made fun of, as if Malik didn’t also threaten his dueling partners with eternal shame. 

Atem won three turns later, and the crowd cheered. Mai made a big show of pouting cutely, posing for the cameras. 

The audience filed out after that, and Bakura took his time, visiting the bathroom and washing his hands and face. 

As much as he wished he could steal cards  _ during _ the expo itself, that wasn’t the practical way to do it. He killed another hour in the bathroom, leaning on the counter and playing Candy Crush, and eventually Rishid walked in, wearing the dark uniform of the security company he was associated with. A backpack was slung over his shoulder.

“The exposition’s over,” Rishid said, nodding at Bakura. “You need to leave.”

“Yeah, yeah, give me a moment,” Bakura said. 

Rishid produced a shirt from his backpack, and Bakura put it on under his button up. Then they both walked out of the bathroom like nothing had happened. 

Bakura left the exhibition center, walked around the block and shed his outer shirt, shoving it in a dumpster. His T-shirt matched the uniform of the movers tasked with dismantling the exhibition, which would be transported over night to Barcelona. Bakura snuck back into the center through a side door, and then the really exciting part of his job started. 

Bakura liked the thrill of snatching up cards right in front of people. They had experts to slip the cards into the protective plastic sleeves they’d be transported in, but once they were packed, everyone took their eyes off the cards. Then Bakura would move the boxes to the moving vans and there, alone in the back of the van, he’d fish through the boxes and fish the cards back out. Twice he was reprimanded for moving too slowly, but no one suspected a thing. 

If all went well, no one would even notice the cards were missing until they we unpacking in Cataluña. 

_ This seems like a huge waste of energy, _ Ryou said.  _ I don’t understand why you don’t just buy the cards. _

_ Paper trail,  _ Bakura replied. _ Now shut up and let me work. _

All in all, he was done by dinner time. He took the metro back to the Ishtar’s apartment, and he unloaded his winnings in Rishid’s bedroom. 

They kept the door closed, as if getting caught by Ishizu was on par with getting caught by the authorities. 

“She’d make you sneak them back in and unsteal them,” Malik muttered when Bakura said as much, and Rishid smiled affectionately. 

“What’s this?” Malik said, making a face and holding up a card. “Diabound?”

“That’s for me,” Bakura said, snatching it out of his hand. 

He hadn’t been able to help himself. He liked Diabound, and it would fit so well into Ryou’s deck that no one would question him having it. 

“You never dip into your own Pot of Greed,” Malik said grimly. 

“Is that a saying?” Rishid asked. 

“No,” Bakura snapped. “No one says that.” 

Ishizu called them for dinner, which meant she waved at a package of pasta and demanded they cook it for her. Bakura chopped up an obscene amount of garlic for it. 

“Do you still eat whole cloves?” Malik asked, watching the water simmer. 

“They’re good for you,” Bakura answered, defensive. “Have you ever known me to get a cold?”

“I guess not,” Malik admitted, although he looked unconvinced. 

After dinner, Malik passed out on the couch before Bakura could claim it, and Ryou quietly suggested they go for a walk. It seemed reasonable, and it was a nice night, so Bakura obliged. 

This neighborhood wasn’t great for nightlife, but there were plenty of mediocre bars with TVs showing off the latest football games. Bakura wasn’t one for sports, but he watched little snippets as he wandered through the streets. 

_ You should try out your new deck, _ Ryou said. 

_ Suddenly okay with me adding cards?  _ Bakura asked. 

_ In Granada you could find all sorts of people to play with, at all sorts of bars and restaurants, _ Ryou continued, ignoring the comment.  _ That was really brilliant. I didn’t have anyone to play with, besides Amane.  _

Bakura was in a good mood, feeling victorious from his latest heist, and he held back another mean comment about Ryou not having friends. He hadn’t been on the Madrid Duel Monsters scene in years, but a trendy, hipster neighborhood seemed like a good place to start, and he headed in that direction. 

_ Oh, I have an idea! _ Ryou suddenly exclaimed, and then the ring was glowing hot, pendants reaching out like a hand gasping for a hold. 

Bakura shrugged and followed its directions. He couldn’t tell how much Ryou had control over the ring, but it had led him to interesting things before. He walked for a long time, and then the ring indicated a small, clean-looking bar. As Bakura approached, Atem himself walked out, Mai Valentine following him. 

“Come ooon,” she crooned at him, grabbing at his arm. “Just one more hour. You can sleep on the plane!”

“Sorry, Mai,” Atem said, gently removing her hand. “I think I’m done for the night.”

Mai sighed dramatically. “You can be so boring sometimes,” she whined, then hip-bumped him and walked back into the bar. 

_ Are you shitting me? _ Bakura thought at Ryou. 

_ I thought he’d be a good challenge, _ Ryou said.  _ Here, you’ll see. _

Bakura had to admit, he had thought a lot about how to beat Atem. Atem’s deck roster was public, after all, and Bakura had seen him on TV enough times to know what types of strategies he favored. It was only natural he’d thought of ways to counter them, but he never thought he’d actually get a chance to try any of them out. 

Ryou walked him up to Atem and in his stupid British accent said, “Excuse me, Atem?”

Atem turned to them and Bakura repeated:  _ Are you SHITTING me? _

“I’m a huge fan,” Ryou said conversationally and stuck out his hand. Atem shook it, polite but looking like he was already trying to think of a way out of this interaction. “I was wondering if you wouldn’t mind a quick game?”

Atem actually winced. “Sorry,” he said, “but I don’t really have time–”

Ryou held out his deck, and Atem cut himself off, eyes widening. 

“I’ve been playing since I was a kid,” Ryou said innocently, and Bakura was impressed with what a good piece of manipulation it was. Ryou was showing off a full deck of original Magic and Wizards cards, the sort of thing you only had if you were as die-hard a player as Atem. Ryou’s were obviously used and played with, too; he was a fan of the original game, not someone who’d fallen for the flashiness of holograms. 

Atem shifted uncomfortably. “I– well– it’s late, but…” he nodded, pulling out his own cards. “Yeah, why not? A short game, though– four thousand life points.”

“Perfect, thank you,” Ryou said, smiling in a disgustingly sweet sort of way that Bakura had not known his own face was capable of. 

They ended up using an overturned crate in an alley as a table. Atem looked bemused by it. 

“This reminds me of grade school,” he said, grinning at Ryou as he shuffled his deck. 

_ You’re playing with me, right? _ Ryou asked Bakura. 

_ Of course I am!  _ Bakura answered. He wanted his body back to play himself, to hurl taunts at Atem in their native tongue, but Ryou had already walked up to him as an overly polite British man. Bakura thought he could imitate Ryou’s bland personality, and if he just switched to Arabic Atem wouldn’t notice a sudden shift in English accent, but there was no way Bakura would be able to keep himself calm enough to keep up the charade throughout the entire game. 

_ Give me back my body, _ he demanded anyway, because fuck it if Atem noticed a bizarre shift in personality. 

_ I don’t think that’s a good idea, _ Ryou replied, then out loud he said, “It was harder to find someone to play with back then.”

Atem hummed in agreement as he drew his cards. “You can go first, if you want.”

_ What should I play? _ Ryou asked. 

_ Tell him to go first, _ Bakura answered. Atem typically started off weak and then pulled out some wild strategy after he’d felt out his opponent. It generally gave him the vibe of an underdog, even when he was recognized as the best in the world, and it was infuriatingly crowd-pleasing. Better to force him into being the aggressor first. 

“Challenger never goes first,” Ryou said, smiling sheepishly at him. 

Atem shrugged and played a monster. Ryou followed Bakura’s instructions carefully for the next couple of turns, then chewed on his lip thoughtfully when Bakura finally gave instructions he objected to. 

_ That’s definitely going to lose us a lot of life points, _ he said. 

_ So? _ Bakura said.  _ The whole point is to move as many cards through your hand as possible.  _

Ryou must know that. He made the deck. They needed monsters in the graveyard to summon Dark Necrofear, and they needed to move through cards fast to get all the spirit message cards. 

_ It’s risky… _ Ryou thought back. 

_ It’s a risky deck you made, dipshit,  _ Bakura replied.  _ Play the card. _

Ryou blinked dolefully at Atem, and Bakura bet this sort of move was incredibly disarming in Ryou’s actual, sweet-face body. Bakura wasn’t sure what it would look like on his face, but he’d bet money it was creepy. 

“Have you read the history of Magic and Wizards at all?” Ryou asked, playing the card Bakura wanted. 

Atem raised his eyebrows at the card. Maybe if Bakura were the one in control, he’d have picked up on Bakura having an ulterior motive for making bad plays. Ryou, however, sort of gave off the aura of being a slight dumbass. 

Atem flipped one of his face-downs and a complicated series of events ended with Dark Magician Girl attacking their life points directly. 

“Ah…” Ryou said, blinking down at their side of crate top, which was now free of any cards. 

“I’ve read some of the publications of the so-called Monster Tablets,” Atem said, a smirk tugging at at the corner of his mouth. Bakura had never wanted to punch him more. “I end my turn.”

“Do you know why Pegasus was so fixated on popularizing them?” Ryou said, drawing a card. 

“His family was already making toys,” Atem said, shrugging, “and he happened to find an ancient game that was profitable.” 

_ Do it now, _ Bakura said as Ryou glanced at the card he’d just drawn, a dark sort of glee building in him. 

“That’s not quite it,” Ryou said, separating the card from the rest of his hand. “The very first theories on the Monster Tablets were that they were part of a darker ritual. After the loss of wife, Pegasus learned that the ritual had to do with conquering death, and he became obsessed.”

Bakura was not impressed with this dramatic monologue, but Ryou let the car drop onto the table, which meant that they could finally reveal their hand against Atem.

“I remove three fiend monsters from my graveyard and special summon Dark Necrofear,” Ryou said in the same soft tone he’d used to randomly start talking about dark rituals. Bakura drank up Atem’s look of surprise for the briefest moment before the whole world went sideways. 

One moment they were sitting in a dark alley, the yellow glow of streetlights at their back, the general yelling and laughter of a city on a Saturday night. And then, the light was gone, the sounds and noises were gone, the warmth of the Madrid night was gone. It didn’t feel sudden to Bakura, as if they had all been gradually fading away and he just hadn’t noticed. 

The same thing seemed to happen to Atem, as he frowned at glanced around in confusion before jumping up and taking several steps back. 

“I don’t know what you’re doing–” he started.

Ryou stood as well, brushing off Bakura’s jeans as he did so. The walls of the alley were gone now, the crate was gone, they were standing five meters apart, they cards spread out on the ground in front of them. 

“We’re just playing the game it was meant to be played,” Ryou said calmly, softly. “Dark Necrofear.”

A shadow faded into existence, forming itself into the shape of a person and filling itself in with color. Dark Necrofear stood in front of them, skeletal and deformed and blue-skinned, the doll in its arms rattling and laughing. 

“Come on, King of Games,” Ryou continued in his soft polite tones. “I’m going to attack your monster.”

Dark Magician Girl bloomed into life in front of Atem, who took another several steps back. She looked around herself in comical concern, then squeaked in fear when her eyes locked onto Dark Necrofear. 

Ryou’s monster lunged. Dark Magician Girl held her staff up in defense, but Dark Necrofear’s long arms batted it aside and literally ripped her apart. 

_ Ryou, what the fuck is this, _ Bakura demanded.  _ Stop it. Stop it now.  _

Atem was shaking, eyes wide and wild with fear. 

“It’s your turn,” Ryou said calmly. Atem did nothing, speechless and cowering, staring in horror at the remains of Dark Magician Girl smeared across the ground at his feet. “Well?” Ryou said. 

_ Ryou, you fucking psychopath, cut it out now, _ Bakura commanded, unable to tell if he was furious or terrified.  _ Give me back my body and put everything back to normal.  _

“The Monster Tablets were made to defend the Game King’s soul,” Ryou said. “If you lose this duel, King of Games, you’ll lose that too.”

Atem said nothing. Bakura screamed some obscenities. Ryou watched, still and calm and unblinking. 

“Well, alright,” Ryou said. “I suppose that’s a pass on your turn?”

Ryou summoned another monster, and they both attacked. Atem screamed and turned to flee, but it was a useless effort. He fell just as easily as his Dark Magician Girl. 

Then, Bakura was on his knees, vomiting onto the pavement as he clutched the crate. The noise and the lights of the city were back. Everything was so loud, so suddenly, and he spent several minutes dry heaving before he could bring himself to sit up. 

On the other side of the crate, Atem was collapsed, whole and unbloodied but clearly unconscious. Unsteadily, Bakura pushed himself to his feet. 

“What the fuck did you do?” he wheezed. 

_ The Game King used the game to play for his soul, _ Ryou said.  _ I’m just using the cards as intended. _

Bakura stared at Atem’s supine form, spread across the concrete. That was an insane answer.  _ What? Why? _

_ Now I get a soul, _ Ryou answered happily. 

Yes, a completely insane answer form an insane ghost. Bakura had to get out of here. He couldn’t be seen with Atem like this. 

He gathered up his cards and fled. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> TOMORROW: the final chapter, the art, the mysteries solved!


	4. the current born from this spring (i know well how able and omnipotent it is)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Shit, meet fan.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Art in this chapter by [the13thcanvas](the13thcanvas.tumblr.com) and [mimibanii](). They both did **fantastic** jobs and were awesome to work with!! <3
> 
> Also, the card games in this chapter get _extra shenanigans_.

_ Don’t you want to see? _ Ryou asked as Bakura ran. He sounded as sleepy and satisfied as a cat who’d caught a mouse.

_ No, I don’t, _ Bakura answered, desperately pushing past people on the sidewalk, like a kid caught snatching a purse. 

_ I promise you’ll like it, _ Ryou said, and then Bakura’s limbs went heavy and he tripped and fell.

When he opened his eyes, Bakura was back in Ryou’s old house, at the foot of the couch. Ryou sat on it, hands clasped tightly on his lap, leaning forward to stare through the doorway. Bakura sat up slowly, glaring at Ryou. 

“I told you–” he started, but Ryou cut him off. 

“Shhh,” he said. “If you’re quiet, you can hear her.”

Bakura scowled, but he was quiet. He knew what Ryou was capable of now. Muffled children’s laughter came from above. 

“Go look,” Ryou urged, face bright and happy.

Bakura wandered into the entryway of the house, and the staircase was now lit up. He could still see the weird figure messing around in the dark across the hall, but the thing Ryou wanted him to see was upstairs. Bakura ascended. 

The door at the end of the hall was open, and a little girl’s voice whining, “Ryou, you’re so _ mean–” _

“Come on, we can play again,” was the answer. 

Bakura crept up to the doorway, but neither of the children inside seemed to notice them. They looked exactly like the ones in the photo he’d found– a younger Ryou and Amane then, squatting in Amane’s room, her name spelled in block letters across the door. A game of Magic and Wizards was set up between them on the plush carpet, and based on Amane’s pout, she’d either just lost or was about to. 

“I want to play Capsule Monsters,” she said, arms crossed. “You never let me win at cards.”

“Ah, okay,” Ryou agreed, and they cleared the cards and set up a board. Ryou’s cards looked like more child-friendly ones than in the deck Bakura had found in Nerja. It must be a different one.

The two of them giggled over jokes Bakura didn’t get as they played. He watched silently, bored by the game itself but unable to look away. Then he heard a loud sob from down the hall, and he went to investigate.

A door that read RYOU in the same block letters was ajar, and Bakura peered in. Ryou was at a desk, right under a window that was the room’s only source of light, gloomy with the overcast sky outside. This Ryou looked closer in age to the one downstairs, and Bakura approached him silently, the carpet absorbing the sound of his footsteps. 

Ryou was writing a letter, occasionally hiccupping with unshed tears, and Bakura leaned over him to see what it said. 

> _ Dear Amane, _
> 
> _ It’s been fourteen months today since we said goodbye. I have been so lonely without you. Father misses you too, so much that he can’t bare to be at home anymore. I have not seen him since May, but don’t worry, Mrs. Clapton nextdoor makes sure I am doing well. _
> 
> _ Mrs. Clapton is very kind, but I would rather she not visit. She does not approve of my experiments with your Necklace, so I will have to hide them better. Father’s notes are at least helpful in this regard. I am so close to seeing you again, Amane. _
> 
> _ School starts again next week, and I have spent this whole summer missing our lovely holidays in Nerja. I am so sad I left my treasure box and my Ring there; surely they would make this easier. Do you remember– _

Bakura stopped reading and stepped back, feeling queasy. He didn’t want to see this part of Ryou, this sad and lonely and pathetic part of him. He hated it, hating seeing a weakness Bakura himself wasn’t allowed to have. 

He went back down the stairs. “RYOU,” he yelled, “Let me out–”

He paused at the bottom of the stares. The figure in the dark room had paused whatever it was doing, turned to look at Bakura. Bakura stared back. It was another Ryou, Amane’s necklace around his neck, the Eye of Horus twinkling at Bakura in the light of the entryway.

Bakura took a hesitant step forward, and Ryou turned back around. He was kneeling on the floor, a formal dining table pushed away to a corner. A metal serving plate was in front of him, filled with random dried plants. Magic and Wizards cards surrounded him and the plate, arranged in a bizarre pattern, and around the cards were piles and piles of books and papers. Bakura bent to pick one up: a print out of a scholarly manuscript titled _ The Game King: A Look Into the Dark World of Necromancy. _Arthur Hawkins was the first author, followed by Pegasus J. Crawford. Underneath was a dusty book on medieval magic. 

“Ammit, Osiris, Set…” Ryou chanted, and then he lit the contents of his plate on fire. “I challenge you for the soul of Amane Hawkins,” Ryou and announced into the fire. He produced a hairbrush, pulled a white hair from it, and dropped it into the fire. 

Bakura watched, unimpressed, as Ryou stared at the fire expectantly. Ryou called on the gods again, and again, and Bakura rolled his eyes. Then one of the cards next to the plate caught fire, and Ryou’s eyes lit up. The fire spread to the neighboring card, and then the next. 

“Hear me,” Ryou demanded of the fire, “Hear my challenge–”

A stack of papers caught fire. Ryou paused, worry crossing his face. More papers and books caught fire, and Ryou let out a sad little yelp and pulled off his cardigan to try and smother the fire. 

It didn’t work. Bakura backed away from the fire as it grew, although he felt no heat from it. 

“You see now, don’t you?” The real Ryou called from his couch. He’d stretched across it, and he yawned as Bakura turned to him. “I figured it what went wrong. You can’t duel for a soul that’s already passed on– but you can for a living one. I’m going to trade Atem for Amane.”

“That’s insane,” Bakura said. Against every ounce of his willpower, he was shaking. He didn’t know if it was fear or anger. “You can’t–”

“And then we can trade souls for _ anyone,” _ Ryou continued, stretching and snuggling into a couch cushion. “Don’t you have an Amane you want to see?”

Bakura opened his mouth and found he had no answer. 

“Sleepy,” Ryou said. “I’ll see you when I wake up.”

And then Bakura was back on the streets of Madrid, right where he’d fallen, a stray cat sniffing at him. 

\--

When Bakura got back to Ishizu’s, Malik was passed out on the couch, his head lolling on Ishizu’s shoulder. The TV was on, volume low, and it illuminated Ishizu’s face blue when she turned to look at Bakura. It was disgustingly cute, and if Bakura were less freaked out, he would have taken a photo for blackmail purposes. 

The tiny little smile melted off of Ishizu’s face as she took him in. “What’s wrong?” she mouthed at him, pointing the remote to switch off the TV. 

Bakura shook his head. He didn’t need to get Ishizu involved. He might have just murdered someone, after all, and he didn’t need to get other people mixed up in his problems. 

But then Ishizu shoved Malik off of her and stood, crossing to him with lips pursed.

“You have been behaving irradicatically,” Ishizu accused. Behind her Malik grunted groggily and peered around the room, his hair mussed from sleep. “I can assure you, if you need to hide a body, I have a _ much _ better idea of how to destroy the evidence than you.”

Bakura blinked at her. She scowled at him, crossing her arms. Bakura was sure she didn’t actually suspect him of homicide, but still– still–

He couldn’t help it. He burst into laughter. 

Ishizu looked vaguely affronted, and Malik came to stand at her shoulder, eyes bleary with sleep. Bakura laughed and laughed, the pitch of his laughter growing and growing until he sounded the slightest bit manic.

“Dude,” Malik said once he’d calmed down. “Did you actually kill someone?”

“Maybe,” Bakura said. “Do you believe in ghosts?”

He perhaps should not have phrased it quite like that, because Ishizu slapped him. 

“Bakura,” she said, voice not any louder than a whisper but tight and furious. “You tell me _ immediately _ when you need to hide a body, not after it becomes a problem–”

“I didn’t kill anyone,” Bakura clarified, rubbing his face. 

“So, what about a ghost?” Malik said, squinting at him. “You ran into someone from Egypt and they’re bugging you?”

Bakura stared at him grimly. 

“Oh no,” Malik groaned. 

“What?” Ishizu asked, eyes darting between them. She conspicuously did not apologize for slapping Bakura. 

“He thinks he has an actual ghost,” Malik said. 

_ “What?” _ Ishizu repeated. 

It took some talking to convince the Ishtars that he was being haunted, but not as much as he would have guessed. He knew they both had their own secrets and superstitions; when you grew up in your father’s underground bunker, you saw a whole lot of nothing mixed in with some absolute bat-shit stuff. 

They both ended up on their computers: Ishizu at her desktop with the ring splayed out on the desk next to her, and Malik on his laptop on the coffee table, glaring at articles about the Hawkins family’s demise. 

“There was a house fire,” Malik confirmed, frowning at his laptop. “It doesn’t mention Ryou by name, but it says no foul play was suspected, and there’s a statement from a neighbor named Meredith Clapton.”

Bakura shot a look over at the Ring. He didn’t feel a twitch from Ryou. The ghost must still be asleep. 

“Go to the news,” Bakura said quietly. “I want to see if anyone found Atem.”

Malik pulled up a handful of newsfeeds and called over to Ishizu, “Hey, you figured out how to exorcise it yet?”

He had to call twice more before Ishizu looked and said, “Exorcise…? No, I’m researching the Millennium Site...”

“What good is that going to do?” Malik asked. “Hey, if it’s a British ghost, does it obey British ghost rules? Can we just take it to a priest? Where can we find a protestant priest in Spain–”

“It’s important because,” Ishizu said, at a slightly higher volume than normal to cut of Malik, drumming her fingers against her IKEA desk as she glared at the screen, “the ghost’s father was the one who excavated the site the Millennium Items were found in.”

The timeline of Dr. Arthur Hawkins sad career went like this: in the 1970s, he’d been a well-respected archaeologist and had been a leader on the dig that had unearthed the Monster Tablets, and then published several papers on ritualistic purposes that were later discredited. The Monster Tablets seemed to be, after all, just a game a young pharaoh had made up. Pegasus J. Crawford had co-authored a lot of those papers, but had also been using his family’s toy company to develop the Monster Tablets into the world’s most lucrative game. 

With his theories fallen out of favor and his co-author out of academia, Dr. Hawkins had turned to a different site, which turned up nothing. His career went more or less inactive after that, and he was currently teaching faculty at a small college. 

Two things didn’t add up. First, Ryou said his father was constantly visiting Egypt, even through the period when his research seemed to have stopped. Second, the dig that had “turned up nothing” was the Millennium Site, reopened fifteen years later in 2000 to reveal mysterious artefacts. Dr. Hawkins had obviously found the Millennium Items and sent several of them back to his family when he’d first excavated the site. Why lie about it, if his career was stalling? Why steal the artefacts that could keep him in the game?

“The Millennium Site usually comes up in talks about academic integrity,” Ishizu said when Bakura had voiced his thoughts. She chewed at her bottom lip. “A lot of things about are controversial– most people think the items were planted there. The only thing that gives it any credit is… oh, I’ll show you…” 

She opened her email and opened a message from Pegasus J. Crawford. 

“You’ve been emailing with him?” Malik asked, scandalized. 

Ishizu nodded. “I spoke to him about his talk and told him I was a doctoral student interested in the history of gaming and we traded information. He sent me some high resolution pictures of the Monster Tablets. Hold on– this is the important one.”

It was an engraving, of two men standing in front of their own Monster Tablets. Ishizu pointed at the figure on the right. “This one is supposed to be the Game King,” she said. “Note his headpiece. He was buried in it, too.” 

Emblazoned on the Pharaoh’s crown was the weird Eye of Horus, the one on all the artefacts Dr. Hawkins had given to his children. 

“There are a couple of other carvings of people with items with that eye,” Ishizu said. “It’s the only link to the Millennium Items that anyone has found.” She paused, turning to Bakura. “If you don’t mind, I’d like to take your ring in tomorrow and see if we can date it.”

Bakura shrugged. “Sure,” he said. “But it will probably just come back to me when Ryou wakes up.”

Malik yawned, picked up a pile of cards he’d left on the coffee table, and then handed a card over to Ishizu. “Just slap that down on top of it,” he said. 

“Swords of Revealing Light…?” Bakura asked, eyebrows raised. 

Malik shrugged. “You said he brought cards to life, right? Might as well use that against him.”

Bakura thought that sounded dumb, but in the morning he still hadn’t heard a whisper from Ryou and the ring was still sitting on Ishizu’s desk where they’d left it, Swords of Revealing Light balanced on top. 

“I called Pegasus,” Ishizu said over her coffee. “I told him you were in Barcelona and interested in his research. He agreed to talk to you since–” she winced– “The Barcelona Expo has been cancelled due to Atem’s sudden medical problems.”

He was in a hospital in Madrid was all she’d gathered from Pegasus, who’d flown into Barcelona yesterday evening. 

“We’re not in Barcelona,” Malik said slowly. 

“Well,” Ishizu said, “you’re going to be. There’s an AVE at 10:30.”

AVE was Spain’s high speed train. It could get them to Barcelona in three hours. Malik whined about the price of tickets, even as they got ready. 

“Dress nice,” Ishizu instructed, and Bakura had to borrow one of Malik’s shirts. He made fun of Malik’s sense of style all the time, but unlike him, Malik actually owned things like name-brand clothes. 

“Here,” Ishizu said as they were walking out the door. She handed him a hair tie. “Tie your hair back.”

“Why doesn’t Malik have to?” Bakura whined, even as he complied. 

“Because _ I _ don’t use the grocery store brand shampoo,” Malik said, flipping his golden hair over his shoulder. It _ was _ a lot shinier than Bakura’s. 

“Because Malik’s hair looks like part of a fashion statement,” Ishizu said, a smile tugging at her lips, “and you just look mean and unbathed.”

“Excuse me–” Bakura started, and she closed the door in his face. Malik snorted with laughter. “I’ve been using your shampoo since we got here,” Bakura snapped. 

“What?” Malik said, immediately sobering. “Bakura! That stuff is _ expensive–” _

They bickered all the way to the train station. While they were waiting on the platform, Bakura got a text from a foreign number.

_ Hello, Bakura!! Your wonderful sister said you would treat me to lunch~ _

It was followed by a bunch of emojis. Was this man really the CEO of a giant company?

When they were getting on the train, Ishizu texted him the address of a restaurant she’d made them reservations at. 

_ Pretend sangría is popular up there, _ she said. _ He was VERY excited about authentic Spanish sangría. _

Bakura rolled his eyes and showed the text to Malik. Malik looked up the restaurant’s menu on his phone and immediately started griping about how pricey it was. 

They showed up at the restaurant feeling very disoriented. Pegasus was already inside, chatting up the hostess. 

“Uh, reservation for Ishtar,” Bakura said very stiffly. 

“Can you spell that?” the hostess asked, pulling out a clipboard. 

“Ah, the infamous Ishtar brothers!” Pegasus said and grabbed Bakura’s hand and clapped him on the back. 

Bakura wasn’t sure what Ishizu had said to him, but he definitely wasn’t an Ishtar. Malik received a similar overly-familiar greeting, although he handled it more smoothly, shaking Pegasus’s hand back. 

Malik was, in general, a much better talker than Bakura. He helped Pegasus pick out an “authentic Catalán meal” and ordered them a pitcher of sangría. He talked about his “small family business” with Pegasus without making it sound at all like a den of illegal activity that leeched Pegasus’s own profits and had robbed him directly just yesterday. 

They must not have unpacked any of the cards to the cancelled exposition. Pegasus didn’t even know he’d been robbed yet. Bakura watched them talk, and it felt exactly like being in a church and looking at a painting of the serpent smooth-talking Eve. 

“You said it’s a family business…?” Pegasus asked. 

“Yes, Bakura helps me run it,” Malik said, glancing at Bakura. “He’s mostly involved in…”

“Acquisitions,” Bakura said flatly. It wasn’t really a family business, since he wasn’t an Ishtar, but if Pegasus was only talking to them because he liked Ishizu…

“I had the best talk with your sister,” Pegasus said. “She’s very knowledgeable, and she posed some questions that stumped even me. She said you needed help with something…?”

“Yes,” Malik said. “Recently, Bakura found something odd that we think might be linked to the Millennium Site dig.”

“Really?” Pegasus said, taking a long sip of sangria. “You know that dig has a bit of a… reputation, right?”

“Right, Ishizu gave us the run-down,” Malik agreed. “But Bakura found something weird.”

Malik nodded at Bakura, who took out his phone and opened a photo of the ring he’d taken last night. 

“Dr. Hawkins sent that back to his son,” Bakura said. “And I found evidence he sent other items like that too. Said he got them from a dig. That dig, I assume.”

“And how did you find that?” Pegasus said, frowning slightly. 

“I found his son’s diary,” Bakura lied. “They used to vacation outside of Granada and their stuff ended up in a second-hand shop.”

“Arthur was always talking about the Mediterranean,” Pegasus mused. 

“But my question is,” Bakura said, picking his phone back up and staring Pegasus down grimly. “Is this real?”

Pegasus blinked slowly at him, and Bakura was briefly worried they’d let him drink too much sangría. 

“Arthur was a good friend,” Pegasus said, suddenly sounding sad. “When I lost my wife, he was so supportive, and I…” Pegasus swirled his glass, watching the pieces of orange and apple bump into each other. “Arthur’s working theory for the Monster Tablets was that the pharaoh was experimenting with a new religious practice. He tried to integrate the game theory my wife proposed by saying it was the challenge the gods. Ah, but it’s so sad!”

Pegasus smiled at them and leaned over to pour the both of them more sangría. “Such a sad story, and no one believes that theory anyway–”

“Challenge the gods for what?” Bakura growled, and Malik kicked him under the table and shot him a warning look. 

Pegasus raised his eyebrows and took another sip of sangría. “Oh my,” he said. “What _ was _ in that diary?”

“Dr. Hawkins son,” Malik said very delicately, before Bakura could say something decidedly indelicate, “was very into the occult, and um… necromancy.”

Pegasus winced. “Ah, well…”

“Well?” Bakura prompted. Pegasus sighed, took another long gulp of sangría, and then gave Bakura a very tired look.

“When I lost my wife,” he said slowly. “I was crushed. Have you ever lost a loved one, Bakura?”

Next to him, Malik tensed immediately.

“Yes,” Bakura gritted out, even as Malik grabbed his arm. It was probably to keep Bakura from doing something stupid, but must have looked like a gesture of comfort and sympathy to Pegasus, as he smiled grimly and kept talking.

“I would have done anything to have her back,” Pegasus said, “and here was my good, supportive friend, with a theory about battling the gods of death. I co-signed his theory, pushed publications through for him, egged him on. A terrible thing to do in hindsight, but when you’re in mourning…

“You want it to be true,” Pegasus finished. 

“But what does that have to do with ancient jewelry?” Malik asked, unimpressed. 

Pegasus sighed again. “When it became obvious it was just a normal game– we kept unearthing more and more toys from the tomb– Arthur became obsessed with his game-against-death theory and decided there must be other, magical items the pharaohs used to summon the monsters. Ancient Egyptians were very into immortality, afterall.”

As far as Bakura knew, they were more into the immortality of the soul than staying on earth forever, but it sounded like Dr. Hawkins was beyond rational thinking. 

“So– what?” Malik asked. “He fixated on the pharaoh’s crown for some reason, and went off to find more?”

“Not just the crown,” Pegasus answered. “We found a puzzle with that strange eye, too. It went missing, though. This sangría is lovely, by the way.”

He downed the rest of it and hailed a waiter to bring them a second pitcher. He spent the rest of lunch loudly talking to them about card games and, for some reason, cartoons. Malik shrugged off the weird turn the conversation took easily enough and laughed along with him, and at the end of the meal, convinced him to pay for them. 

Bakura stayed silent. He knew where the missing puzzle went. 

\--

_ So nice meeting you!! _ Pegasus texted him when they were on the train back to Madrid. _ Tell Malik to bring your sister to the Euro Championship and I’ll treat them both to champagne. <3 _

“Is this creepy?” Bakura asked, handing Malik his phone. 

Malik seemed conflicted and called Ishizu on his own phone. 

Instead of a real greeting when they got back to Madrid, Ishizu opened the door and announced without preamble that the ring was a fake. 

“You sound excited,” Malik observed. 

“Metals are hard to date absolutely,” Ishizu said. When she was excited, she didn’t get loud, but she talked very quickly and very intensely. “But the joint work on the Ring seemed distinctly modern, so I cross-referenced–”

Bakura did not actually understand what exactly Ishizu had done, but he nodded along as she talked. She led them to the kitchen, where she’d laid out a now-cold delivery pizza. 

“It must have been a reject for the other fakes,” Ishizu concluded, tapping her chin with a knuckle. “He knew it would look too modern, so he sent it to his son–”

“Wait,” Malik interrupted, picking mushrooms off a slice of pizza. “You think Dr. Hawkins planted the Millennium Items?”

“It’s the simplest explanation, isn’t it?” Ishizu said, popping one of Malik’s discarded mushrooms into her mouth. “His theory didn’t pan out, so he planted fakes to _ make _ his theory true.”

That night, Bakura pulled all the publications Ishizu had printed out or them. Malik was passed out on the couch, so he read them at the kitchen table. They were jargon-heavy and not in his native language, so the reading was slow going, and he found himself using an online dictionary more than he’d like to admit. 

Slowly, though, he started to piece together what type of man Arthur Hawkins was. 

The first publication— a short bulletin on his findings so far– read exactly like a boring documentary sounded. Lots of conjecture on “unknown ceremonial purposes” and “artwork ahead of its time.” Boring stuff, mostly. 

The progression to insistence on “Necromantic Games” was gradual, and contained a lot of normal academic mumbo jumbo and citations. Bakura skimmed most of it, as it just sounded like a man desperate to prove himself right. 

Bakura could pinpoint the year Pegasus’s wife died, though, because his names started appearing on papers, and Dr. Hawkins’s writing took a sharp turn into the weird. He rambled about the Ancient Pharaohs’ obsession with their own immortality. At first he stated the pharaoh wanted to battle gods with the Monster Tablets to save his soul, and then he claimed the pharaoh could battle the gods to bring souls _ back. _

Ancient Egyptians had a complex religion, and Bakura wouldn’t pretend to know much about it, but he was sure none of what Dr. Hawkins was saying made any sense with any historical documentation. Sure, the Weighing of the Heart Ceremony– where a heart was tested for purity by weighing it against a feather– was described in accurate detail, but then he went off the rails talking about monsters that could fight off Ammit for you and save your soul. 

The final publication from Hawkins and Crawford was _ A Look Into the Dark World of Necromancy. _In it, they proposed several different potential uses of the Monster Tablets as agents of raising the dead. One theory was the one Ryou had given Bakura– to trade a living soul for a dead one. 

_ Immortality gets lonely, _ Hawkins and Crawford wrote. _ Why not have a ceremony to keep your loved ones with you? _

Bakura felt a deep, blinding shock of rage at that. He wasn’t sure if it was on behalf of his ancestors, who were having their beliefs stomped all over, or on behalf of the Game King, who was having his fun card game desecrated by mad men, or behalf of all the people who’d had their loved ones ripped away, who’d had to mourn and grieve and learn to accept the world as it was. What an insane leap of logic! What _ arrogance! _

Bakura sat at the kitchen table, seething. He jumped when Rishid walked in. 

“You’re up late,” Rishid observed, opening the fridge. 

Rishid was currently working security at a club that ran until daybreak most nights– if he was home, it meant Bakura was going to need a lot of coffee to make it through the day. 

Bakura organized the documents back into a pile for Ishizu, and Rishid ripped up lettuce for a salad, which he topped with canned tuna and a boiled egg. He sat down at the table across from Bakura and said, “Ishizu told me you’re being haunted by a ghost.”

Bakura grunted in response. It was true, of course, but it sounded ridiculous when said aloud. 

“What are you going to do about it?” Rishid asked, not sounding much like he cared. He always sounded like that, though, unless Malik was having some sort of breakdown, then it was all brotherly concern. Bakura wasn’t offended. He shrugged in response. 

“In movies,” Rishid said, mixing his salad slowly in front of him, “you’d have to put the soul to rest. You know, take it back to its childhood home and bury it or something.”

Bakura rolled his eyes. “This isn’t a movie. Why would that work?”

Rishid chewed slowly and swallowed. “How does it work, then? What are the rules?"

“I don’t know,” Bakura snapped back, standing. “It’s a ghost. That’s all anyone knows.”

Except, he thought as he stomped off to shower before trying to sleep in the damn armchair, he did know some things about how Ryou worked. He knew he could take over his body, could summon the ring back to him, could warp reality to suit his own own needs. He had died trying to repeat a fake ritual, and as a ghost he made his world fit the absurd theories of his father, desperate to meet the dead. Did Ryou even need rules? 

_ Let’s play a game, _ Ryou had told him. 

Well, Bakura thought. Games definitely had rules. 

\--

They bussed back to Granada that afternoon, and Bakura left the Ring behind with Ishizu in case she could find out more. Malik disappeared, busy organizing making copies of their stolen loot, and three days later, the Ring appeared on Bakura kitchen counter. 

Bakura sighed, and went to the bank to deposit cash to buy a plane ticket. 

_ You’re not mad at me, are you? _ Ryou asked that night, sounded oddly concerned. _ I didn’t mean to scare you. I can explain why I did what I did– I wanted to show you, I can help you see _ your _ loved ones too– _

_ Save it, _ Bakura thought back. 

_ I wanted to see my sister, _ Ryou said in a very small voice.

Bakura shifted uncomfortably on in bed. He didn’t care about what Ryou wanted. Who didn’t have someone they wanted to see?

_ I’m going to show you something too, _ Bakura said finally. _ I don’t want to hear another word until then. _

_ I guess that’s fair, _ Ryou said eventually. _ Good night. _

He was silent after that, and on the bus to the airport, and on both flights to Cairo, and on the bus out of Cairo, and even as Bakura paid a man to drive him out to the middle of the desert and then stop at small plot of rubble and collapsed houses. 

“Come back for me at sunset,” Bakura said. 

The man raised his eyebrows as high as they would go. “You sure about that? This is a ghost town.”

Bakura couldn’t help the mean smile that crossed his face. “I know,” he said. 

“You got water?” the man asked, still incredulous.

“Of course,” Bakura answered, tapping the bag at his side, and the man shrugged and drove off. 

When the car was out of site, Bakura found the most in-tact wall left and climbed it. He stood nimbly at the top, taking in the sight of the wasteland before him. 

_ What is this place? _ Ryou asked, voice straining with barely restrained curiosity. 

“Welcome,” Bakura announced, voice going on and on in the open desert, “to Kul-Elna, my hometown.”

Ryou didn’t say anything for a long time, but then on the sand below him, a shadowy figure flickered to life. Ryou stood below him, fuzzy around the edges and transparent, peering up at him with sad brown eyes. 

“Why are you showing me this?” Ryou asked, his voice quiet and restrained. 

“You showed me your childhood home,” Bakura said, hopping down from the wall to meet the ghost. “I’m returning the favor.”

Ryou turned, surveying the scenery with a trembling lip. What was left of the buildings of Kul-Elna were skeletons now– a stone wall here, a door frame there. Most of the town lay in pieces at their feet. 

“The bodies have been cleared out, at least,” Bakura said conversationally. 

“This is…” Ryou started. He bit his lip instead of whatever he was going to say.

“Terrible? Horrible?” Bakura prompted. “Just plain awful?”

“A tragedy,” Ryou decided on. 

“Mm, that too,” Bakura agreed. He paced around Ryou, stepping over and onto chunks of concrete and metal. He gestured out over the town and said, “Well?”

“Well?” Ryou asked. 

“You were going to see your dead sister,” Bakura said. “How do I see mine?”

“I…” Ryou made an aborted gesture with his hand. His big brown eyes were glassy. 

“How do I see my mother?” Bakura continued. “My father? My brother? My auntie, my grandmother, my cousins?” His voice rose, hash and loud and unmitigated by the dry desert air. “How do I see my goddamn cat again, Ryou?”

“I–I’m not–” Ryou stuttered, flinching away. “Bakura, that’s so many–”

“So?” Bakura asked, crossing his arms. “You’re trading Atem for your sister, right? What if I want to get into soul-trading?”

“You can’t,” Ryou said. His voice cracked, but otherwise his gaze was firm. 

“Why not?” Bakura asked. 

Ryou didn’t answer him, the line of his mouth thin. The edges of him faded more, and Bakura could see more and more of the horizon through him transparent form. Bakura grinned wide and feral. 

[Full size.](https://mimibanii.tumblr.com/post/186925813113/a-couple-sketches-i-did-for-exemplarybehaviour-s) Art by [mimibanii.](https://mimibanii.tumblr.com)

“C’mon, Ryou,” Bakura practically cooed. “Let’s play a game. A soul for a soul.”

Ryou continued to disappear, but Bakura could see what was left of his fists clench. 

“You don’t want my soul?” he mocked. “You could get your mother too! Or at least a vacant body.”

Ryou’s eyes went wide, and Bakura raised his eyebrows, expectant. 

_ Alright, _ Ryou said, right into his mind, making the hairs on the back of his neck stand up. His voice was calm, stagnant water. _ Challenge accepted. _

Ryou came back into focus lightning fast, dark shadows spreading out from his feet and covering Kul-Elna like thick oil, swirling up into the air and blocking out the sun. When the shadows settled, they were standing in nothing, and then Bakura blinked and there was furniture. 

[Full size.](https://the13thcanvas.tumblr.com/post/186936836728/challenge-accepted) "Challenge Accepted" by [the13thcanvas.](the13thcanvas.tumblr.com)

Between them was Bakura’s makeshift coffee table, wooden crates covered in cloth. Ryou sat on the couch from his old house, and Bakura found Ishizu’s armchair behind him. He sat. 

“I’ll go first,” Ryou said softly. Their decks were already on the table between them, and Ryou drew five cards. Bakura followed suit. 

Ryou played a fiend monster and one facedown. Bakura clenched his jaw as he glanced down at his hand. They both had the same deck. 

Annoying, but it didn’t matter. Of course Bakura had thought of how to beat his own deck. Any strategist would. The problem was that his deck was not _ designed _ to beat itself. 

The first few turns went fast. They played their cards, the monsters were summoned in miniature in front of them, and neither of them attacked because this was obviously a race to summon Dark Necrofear, which required monsters in the graveyard. 

A small smile tugged at the corner of Ryou’s lips. “I guess one of us has to make the first move,” he said, soft laughter behind his voice. 

He called an attack on one of Bakura’s three monsters. His monster was weaker, and Bakura’s monster stomped its head in. 

“One for me,” Ryou practically purred. 

On his turn, Bakura attacked Ryou’s remaining monster. “Two for you,” he said, smirking. Then he attacked Ryou’s life points. 

“Ah,” Ryou said, frowning at his cards. Blood started to drip from his nose. “That’s a pity.”

Ryou wiped the blood away, unbothered, and Bakura felt his blood run a little colder. Was that the risk of losing life points in this game? 

“You know, these decks aren’t identical,” Ryou said, selecting a card. “You never found my side deck, afterall.” He played a magic card, and a winged creature appeared on the table, as big as Bakura’s hand. “This is one of my favorites: Change of Heart.”

Bakura scowled as the card took control of one of his monsters and moved it to Ryou’d side of the field. It attacked a stronger monster, destroying itself. 

“I remove three monsters from my graveyard and special summon Dark Necrofear from my hand,” Ryou murmured, just shy of smug. It appeared before him in an dramatic swirl of purple smoke, the baby doll in its arms rattling and writhing. 

Dark Necrofear was, at the end of the day, not very strong in the the attack points department. But Bakura’s deck was designed around having weak monsters to tempt his opponent into attacking, and Ryou attacked his weakest one without hesitation. 

It felt like being punched in the gut. Bakura wheezed and coughed up spittle, tinged pink with blood. Okay. That was okay, because he still hadn’t lost. 

It took four more turns to destroy Dark Necrofear. In that time, Ryou added an equip card and attacked him directly, giving him his own nosebleed and making him see spots. He was still blinking away dark spots when he finally drew the magic card to get rid of Dark Necrofear. 

“Oh my,” Ryou said, as Dark Necrofear fall into piece in front of him, just like a doll popping its limbs off. “This doesn’t bode well for me, does it?”

Bakura’s triumphant grin dropped off his face. Ryou was too calm, without that stupid wibbly-sad look he got on his face when things went poorly. Bakura knew what was coming. 

“I play Destiny Board,” Ryou said, carefully sliding the card into place. A tiny spirit carrying the letter D floating into existence above it. “Every turn, for five turns,” Ryou explained, “I’ll play a new letter. When it spells out DEATH, I win.”

“I know how it works,” Bakura griped. It was his deck too, afterall. He even had _ Spirit Message A _ in his hand. 

Ryou must not have drawn Dark Sanctuary yet– if he had, Bakura’s plan would be a bit trickier. He’d hoped Ryou would take longer to play Destiny Board, though. 

“I banish three fiend monsters from my graveyard,” Bakura said, voice tight, “and summon Dark Necrofear.”

Ryou was unphased, even as Dark Necrofear attacked his monster and blood dribbled down his chin from the corner of his mouth. He rubbed it off on the back of his sleeve, now rusty brown with blood. 

“I play Spirit Message E from my deck,” Ryou said. Then he set a monster face down.

The face down monster might be safe to attack, but Bakura knew there were quite a few effect monsters in the deck. Cyberjar and Maneater Bug, for example, were floating around in there. He played Pot of Greed, set his own monster and a facedown card, and ended his turn. 

Ryou played Spirit Message A. 

“I was really expecting more of a fight,” Ryou mused, rearranging his cards in his hand. “But I guess this is my deck, afterall. I know it better.”

Bakura clenched his jaw. He drew a card and ended his turn without setting anything or attacking. Ryou hummed sympathetically. 

“I play Spirit Message T,” Ryou said. “That’s one more turn…” He paused and gave Bakura a worried look. “It will be okay, though. Being dead isn’t so bad.”

_ Except if it weren’t so bad, you wouldn’t still be kicking around as a ghost, _ Bakura thought as Ryou ended his turn. 

“I activate Alchemy Cycle,” Bakura said, flipping the trap card. Ryou arched an eyebrow– its effect was to set all monsters’ attack to 0 for the turn. “Next, I activate Battle Mania, forcing your monster to attack.”

“This is a strange last-ditch effort,” Ryou said as his monster uncurled from its defense position to maul Bakura’s Dark Necrofear. As both their attacks were the same, they destroyed each. “Are you going to start your own Destiny Board? It’s a little late for that.”

“No,” Bakura said. “Because my Dark Necrofear was destroyed in battle, I take control of the monster that destroyed it, and Dark Necrofear comes back as its equip card.”

Dark Necrofear reappeared, crawling from the graveyard. It wrapped its mangled doll in a mess of string and tossed it into a monster card slot. The doll convulsed and then ballooned p into an exact copy of Ryou’s monster, still tangled in string. Dark Necrofear stood behind it, twitching its fingers, wrapped in knotted string, ready to control the thing like a puppeteer. 

“Finally,” Bakura continued, “I move my face-down monster into attack position.”

He flipped it. Diabound sprang to life, stark white and winged, with a hissing snake for a tail. 

“Oh,” Ryou said, sounding surprised but not yet worried. “Your new card. What does it do?”

“Diabound’s effect,” Bakura said, and he couldn’t help the wide grin spreading across his face and pulling at his facial scar, “is to mimic any spell, trap, or monster card in the graveyard.”

Ryou’s eyebrows knitted, and Bakura could almost hear him mentally listing all the cards in the graveyard. 

“Any guesses for what I’m going to pick?” Bakura asked, gleeful in his victory. Ryou looked at him the way people looked at crying children, a type of worry and concern that seemed so performative it made Bakura’s skin crawl. “I pick Change of Heart.”

Diabound’s wings grew– longer to match Change of Heart, and one wing lost its feathers, revealing a leathery bat wing, just like Change of Heart’s mismatched wings. Then Diabound reached over and grabbed the fiend Bakura had stolen from Ryou, dragging it back to Ryou’s side of the field. Dark Necrofear, hands still tangled in the puppet strings, and dragged along behind, hissing and screaming like a tea kettle. 

“I don’t understand…” Ryou said, brows still furrowed. “Why would you…”

The fiend took its position, and Diabound leaped back to Bakura’s side of the field, its wings shrinking back to normal. Dark Necrofear let out on final indignant scream and stood in its place, still equipped to the monster card, taking up Ryou’s final magic card slot. 

“I end my turn,” Bakura said.

“I see,” Ryou said, suddenly hollow both in tone and expression. 

There was no more room to play the last Spirit Message. Ryou drew for his turn, and then stared at his cards. His apathy fall apart, his shoulders dropping and his eyes taking on a hopeless gleen that was practically heartbreaking. 

Bakura had seen heartbreaking, though. He’d waded through it and cast it aside. He stared Ryou down grimly. 

Ryou caught his eyes. “All I wanted,” he said in the tiniest voice, “was to see them again.”

Bakura leaned back in his armchair, folding his arms over his chest. “Get over it,” he said. He made a vague gesture at the darkness around them. “This is all you have now. This is all _ I _ have now. All you can do is accept it.”

“It’s not all _ you _ have, though,” Ryou said, a hint of envy in his voice. He glared at his cards. “I attack Diabound.”

The Spirit Messages, hovering ominously behind the monster field, burst into flame as Ryou’s monster attacked. It was a move that was all spite and no strategy– a better move would have been to sacrifice the monster before it returned to Bakura’s control, but Ryou’s deck had few high-level monsters. The two monsters on the field destroyed each other, screaming a grappling with each other. The smoke from the Spirit Messages faded. Ryou’s side of the field was left empty. 

“I end my turn.”

Bakura shrugged and drew a card. Ryou sat there, blood smeared across his face, shaking and pathetic looking. Bakura wondered if this was a ploy, to make him feel bad and go easy on him. For a moment, sizing him up, Bakura did have a pang of sympathy. Ryou hadn’t even graduated high school. The feeling, however, was easily pushed aside.

Bakura summoned a monster and attacked his life points directly. Ryou collapsed onto his knees, hacking up blood, as the darkness dissolved and they returned to Kul Elna. The sun had gone down, and the air temperature had dropped. Bakura shivered, watching Ryou dry heave as he clung to a piece of exposed rivet. 

A few minutes passed, and then Ryou got himself together enough to stand shakily, his white sweater stained red. 

“I never got it too work,” he said, voice unsteady and rough and filled with spite and just a touch triumphant. “Before I came back to you, I tried to trade Atem for Amane, and it didn’t work. I can’t trade souls. You won’t be able to trade my soul for your family.”

Bakura arched an eyebrow. “The ritual’s not real, kid.”

“Of course it is,” Ryou spat. “Why would my father ruin our lives over it if it weren’t real?”

Bakura shrugged. “Sometimes people want something to be real so much, it affects their reality.”

Look at Ryou, after all– he’d wanted the “Necromantic Games” to be real so bad, his ghost powers or whatever had bled them into reality. 

Ryou snorted. “Sage words, coming from a con-artist.” He spat another mouthful of blood to the the ground. “Well? What are you going to do with my soul, then?”

“We weren’t playing for your soul,” Bakura answered. “What the hell did you do to Atem?”

Ryou eyed Bakura warily. “My father said the Items were important,” he said slowly. “So I stored him in the puzzle. Try solving it.”

“Right,” Bakura said, biting the inside of his cheek. That was going to be so annoying. 

“I have to rest,” Ryou said, fading around the edges.

“Good,” Bakura snapped. 

The sun set, and Bakura started walking down the empty road back to town. The man he’d paid for a ride found him sometime later.

“What were you doing out here?” he asked as Bakura climbed into his car.

“Shut up,” Bakura replied, dropping his bag at his feet. 

Back at his one-star hotel, Bakura called Malik. 

“I’m quitting,” he said. 

“Excuse me?” Malik yelled back. “You can’t quit!”

“Get Dr. Hawkins’s address from Ishizu,” Bakura said. 

“Hold on, asshole,” Malik sneered. “What are you even going to do without me?”

Bakura hung up. He wasn’t completely sure yet, but he was sick of fake handbags and fake cards. He was sick of Ryou’s stupid fake rituals. If he had to get a shitty job in retail or something, at least he’d know what he was selling was real. 

Ishizu texted him the address. In the morning, he mailed the ring to it. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Not quite done yet-- we've got one more little chapter to go~


	5. in this living spring of desire, in this bread of life, i see it (although it is night)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> An epilogue.

Bakura found all three Ishtars at the baggage claim at the Madrid airport, the suitcase he’d bought just for this trip already on a luggage trolly. He was not surprised to see them. 

_It’s not all _**_you_** _have, though,_ Ryou had said. The delusional ghost had been right about one thing, at least. 

“Malik said you quit,” Ishizu said instead of a real greeting. Behind her, Malik pouted and scowled at Bakura. “After a talk–” Ishizu said, which meant she’d given Malik a very long lecture, “we all agree it’s a good idea, because I found you a better job.”

Bakura pulled the trolly away from Rishid. “I don’t like rules and I’m not good at working with others,” Bakura warned. 

“That’s fine,” Ishizu said, a tiny smile on her lips. “I’m sure you’ll like your colleagues, because you’ll be working with me.”

“What?” all three men asked in unison. 

“It’s the family business,” Ishizu said. 

That night, Ishizu triumphantly streamed an interview with Arthur Hawkins on her computer. In it, he admitted to planting fake artefacts at the Millennium Site, with the intention of revisiting it later and proving his theories correct. He’d lost funding and spent all his personal savings before he could uncover what he’d done, though, and when he couldn’t pay the locals he’d hired to work with him, they’d broken the fake tomb open in retaliation. He hadn’t stepped forward to take credit or work on the findings himself for fear of the locals outing him. 

The mummy in the tomb had been bought on the black market, a left over from when Europeans used to trade mummies for their “mystical properties.” 

“Gross,” Malik griped over Dr. Hawkins promising to do everything in his power to help trace the mummy back to where it had come from. 

_ “Shh,” _ Ishizu replied, waving a hand at him but not looking away from the video. 

“I am greatly ashamed of what I did,” Dr. Hawkins said into the camera. “I have no excuses, but I hope the world, and especially the people of Egypt, will accept my apology.”

“Why come forward now?” the reporter asked. 

Dr. Hawkins hesitated to answer, his eyes haunted as color drained from his face. “Recently, I had… a reminder,” he said, “of what I did, and how terrible it was, and I wanted to make it right.”

“Dr. Hawkins tells us a researcher in Madrid has the evidence to corroborate his statements,” the reporter said to the camera. “We look forward to Dr. Ishtar’s report. For more updates on the Millennium Site Controversy, follow us on–”

“You haven’t defended your thesis yet,” Malik whined at Ishizu. “‘Dr. Ishtar,’ my ass–”

“I will at the end of the semester,” Ishizu snapped back. “Pegasus already offered me a post-doc, and Bakura is coming with me.”

“I am?” Bakura asked from where he was currently reclining on her floor. “Do you remember the Card Expo where I–”

Ishizu slammed her fist down on her desk, missing her keyboard by centimeters. “Family! Business!” 

“...does that mean I get to sleep on the couch?” Bakura asked, and Malik threw a pillow at him. 

\--

_ That wasn’t very nice of you, _ Ryou said two weeks later when the ring reappeared in Bakura’s Granada apartment. He was on the balcony again, swing his legs off of it and sipping a beer. 

_ Took you long enough, _ Bakura answered. _ I have a question for you.  _

A vision of Ryou flickered to life beside him, mimicking his position with his legs through the gaps in the railing. His face was serene as he watched the sunset. Bakura took that as a go-ahead to keep talking. 

“I left the puzzle with Ishizu to solve,” Bakura said. “Atem is back, and she’s up for some accolades for finding a stolen artefact.”

“My father made some enlightening phone calls while I was there,” Ryou said dully. “He cried when he opened your package. Thanks, I guess.”

“Anyway,” Bakura continued, ignoring the half-hearted gratitude, “Pegasus offered funding to her to find other lost artefacts.”

“Oh,” Ryou said, pulling his face through the bars. It made his hair stick up goofily. “Good for her.”

“My question is,” Bakura said, “can your ring find things? Like how it found your treasure box, and your photo, and Atem?”

Ryou turned his face slowly to look at him, his face passing right through the bar of the railing. 

“The ring isn’t real,” Ryou said. “None of that was ancient magic.”

“No,” Bakura agreed. “But you’re real, and  _ you’ve _ got… whatever ghosts have.”

A tiny smiled graced Ryou’s face. 

Bakura reclined back on his elbows, shaking his hair back over his shoulders. “So if you could stay good at finding things, I am really good at going and getting things.” He paused, sending Ryou a smirk. “Really,  _ really _ good.”

“I’ve noticed,” Ryou answered dryly. He reached for the top of the railing and used it to pull himself to his feet. “I suppose we could try,” he said. Then a genuine smile crossed his face. “It’ll be an adventure, like Indiana Jones. Or Monster World.”

“Yeah,” Bakura greed, taking another sip of beer. He’d jammed an orange wedge into the bottle, and it was sweet. “Yeah, an adventure.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you for reading!!

**Author's Note:**

> The chapter titles for this fic were taken from Rosalía's "[Aunque es de noche](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6s-MQzPZ6IE)," which is an old Spanish poem set to Flamenco-inspired music. (Specifically, the poem is "Que bien sé yo la fonte" by San Juan de la Cruz, written in 1577.) A lot of the English translations of the poem I found were... creative... so I did my own. My own translation is.... also creative. (I think "aunque es de noche" should be more like "even though it's by night," but that's not as catchy a title, is it?)
> 
> Questions, comments, concerns? Please leave a comment. :)


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